


Letters from the Sky

by ingeniousmacabre



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greek Religion & Lore Fusion, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mythology, And featuring established relationships:, Ben Solo Deserved Better, Eros / Psyche, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Hardcore HEA, Hurt/Comfort, Let's fix the Skywalker curse shall we? And let's do it properly., Mythical Beings & Creatures, Rebelcaptain - Freeform, Redemption, Teacher-Student Relationship, The Act III We Deserved, With musical guest: the Knights of Ren (special edition), actual redemption and healing with a lot of plot, dark themes, finnrose - Freeform, funny you should mention force ghosts..., here there be monsters, slight Stockholm Syndrome but only because he's TOL, there WILL be "kidnappings"... but like as a rescue, what — and i can't stress this enough — does he need to be redeemed for?!?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2020-01-16 01:05:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18510781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ingeniousmacabre/pseuds/ingeniousmacabre
Summary: “He’s not even my type!” Rey watches Poe walk away and turn into a smaller dot on the sidewalk.“Your ‘type’ is a non-existent broody goth who wears black long-sleeves in aforest, Rey. I don’t trust your definition of a ‘dream guy’.”A defensiveness nearly bubbles to the surface, but Rey holds her tongue.Touché.After all, how does one say,My type isn’t just a “dream guy” but is also a “nightmare guy”, and also a possibly real-life teleporting kidnapper with a really deep voice and whose talents not only include being menacingly huge and having forest-transforming vocal acoustics, but also extends to communicating with sea monsters and levitating on ledges while confusing me, his kidnapped victim, with early-onset Stockholm Syndrome.Touché, indeed.ORKylo Ren is the exiled god of Olympus, who stumbles upon a confused Rey whom everyone wants to kidnap. So he gets ahead of the curve and takes her first.aka the angsty Eros x Psyche Modern Greek Gods AU nobody asked for, but with a touch of crack and a side of redemption.





	1. Prologue

“Okay, but Rey, that’s the thing,” says Rose, and she says _thing_ the way one spits out mouthwash. “You can’t say that if you haven’t even seen his face.”

She tears a bite out of her churro with conviction.

Rose is the kind of friend who obsesses about intentionality. That means she consumes only from socially responsible companies, brushes her teeth with bamboo, and refuses anything that comes out of a plastic bottle. But it also means that she could almost mathematically measure every inch of Rey’s dreamy musings, listening so she could surgically cut them up in neat little logic-sized pieces.

Rey doesn’t take it against her friend; she isn’t here to kill joy as much as she wants to resurrect pragmatism, of which they are both fans. Except that Rose is more the critic and Rey the casual viewer in this scenario.

This scenario being Rey’s dreams. And the imaginary guy who inhabits it.

“Wow. I can’t believe I’m even talking about him as if he exists,” Rose adds as an afterthought through a mouthful of churro. “I refuse to enable your goth male fantasies.”

“Oh, so he’s a goth now, is he?”

“You literally just said! ‘I feel like he’s hurting and I just want to hug him’, that’s what you said!” Rose pitches in and out of her deep mocking voice and chuckling delight as Rey pinches her side.

“If you’re gonna dream someone up, at least make him a little more…” Rose’s brows crinkle. 

“More?”

“More— I don’t know, heroic? You know: strong, brave, etcetera etcetera. Make him, like, Indiana Jones or something.”

Rey frowns. “Which one?”

“Um, the first one?” Rose says, her tone underlined with _duh._

Rey lets silence sit comfortably between them. Above them, the sky looks like it came fresh out of the shower: pink and peach and clean, the lingering smell of last night’s spring rain barely touching dawn. The park bench they sit on still feels cold and damp, but neither Rey nor Rose have ever been fussy people.

 _Zephyrus,_ Rey thinks. She remembers that word from her dream last night as she devours half her churro in one go.

Often, her dreams are made-up conversations with a man whose face she couldn’t see. A tall, imposing person, his dream-edges murky on principle. Rey doesn’t remember anymore when he had ceased to become a creature in a mask, and had become a Shadow with whom she shared lengthy, half-made conversations with.

Far too many conversations for her to keep track of, after all.

There is a sliver of time, barely twenty minutes of her Thursday early mornings, that she allows herself to do nothing. Today, the nothing that she’s doing is sitting with Rose, relishing a cold stick of last night’s churros before they head on to Qui-Gon Street to open up her cafe for the day. Thinking about what kind of face she’d like her Shadow to have.

“Dark brown eyes,” Rey says to no one in particular.

“Hmm?” Rose brushes sugar granules off her mouth with the back of her hand, the gleam of her ring something that moves Rey to continue.

“I think, maybe, if I could choose, he’d have dark brown eyes,” Rey says, watching the tops of Mountain Park’s pine trees. Their fuzzy silhouettes look black against the watercolour dawn, and Rey feels a little hollowed-out. “Black hair. He’d have black hair. _And_ he’s tall. And understanding. And gentle—”

“Oh-kay.” Rose drags the syllables out against their will, “I think we need to talk about how you’re _really_ doing, Rey. Your attachment to this guy is…”

Whatever Rose was going to say makes a fade-out exit as she turns back to her churro, nibbling thoughtfully.

“You know you can talk to us, right? Just because Finn and I are engaged—”

“I’m fine!” Rey says, and it sounds too overcompensating for it to be a successful lie.

Rose levels a stare. She is very good at using stares. They are her weapons of choice against stubborn best friends who aren’t very good at lying.

“I’m just…” Rey starts, and ends.

All variants of the feeling that she wants to say wither at the back of her tongue.

 _I’m waiting for something,_ doesn’t sound complete.

 _Something inside me calls to my dreams,_ sounds even more strange.

 _He’s a friend and the only one who knows me,_ would be taken as a point-blank insult.

She leaves the sentence hanging in the cold spring air. Rose does not ask her to elaborate, because Rose loves her.

For Rey, patience is a peculiar sort of virtue. She has never had problems with waiting, except for small, short distances of time that required very little waiting. So she was perhaps the most long-suffering, impatient person she ever knew.

She wishes she could find the words, the phrase, the right form for the thing that inhabits her chest, to say to Rose. But what she does not know is, of all the hidden things inside her— and there are a lot— there is one that she has the most trouble understanding. This is the one, formless and floating, that lingers like the ghosts of a burn.

 _I am waiting for him._   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to my grieving process! :) 
> 
> This chapter is a late-post prologue, but I realised how much I wanted it in the story, because I love Rose and this is one way I'm keeping her close to my heart.
> 
> This story is a Reylo modern retelling of the Eros/Psyche Greek myth. It is designed, however, to address and include several core things:
> 
> \- The Skywalker's story  
> \- Han and Ben  
> \- Poe and Ben  
> \- The Knights of Ren  
> \- Rogue One  
> \- Hux & Phasma  
> \- And other background Star Wars characters, with the possible incorporation of other familiar legends and stories.
> 
> It's my way of honouring Ben, Rey, Han, Anidala, and giving them a closure and HEA that heals their hearts, and ours. 
> 
> Feedback and comments would be much appreciated!!! I hope you guys enjoy!
> 
> Love, always and forever:
> 
> Katie (reyreyalltheway)


	2. An Assortment of Constellational Correspondences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are introductions. Sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Here we have me, your local crack!AU writer, bending the rules of popular greek mythos and turning it into star wars, then bending the rules some more bec you might find mentions of other legends and stories here.
> 
> So I guess "thank you" and "omg im so very sorry" are in order.
> 
> <3

_“_ _Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it)  
_ _into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet._ _”_

_— C.S. Lewis, “Till We Have Faces"_

 

* * *

They called him “love”.

That is, some several thousand years ago, they _used_ to call him love, with reverence and worship and a number of choice livestock offerings (though well-intentioned, they were never quite his thing). They did not know that godship is not all it’s cracked up to be. Most things— in life, in general— hardly ever are.

True power lay in the stars, and nowhere else. The laws of the universe came in a celestial language — destinies and futures, curses, verdicts, and godlines; they were all read from the constellations, like cryptic letters from the sky, always proving true and final. (He knows this finality more than anyone.) But these invisible authors made very poor narrative choices and little to no _point_ , really, as far as Kylo Ren is concerned. Except to those who were gifted with divinely uncommon sense.

Like Maz, for instance. The prophet of uncommon sense herself.

“And you wonder why your dreams hate you. You need to start listening to me, child."

Kylo veers out of his thoughts, attention back at this wiry, wizened old prophetess, puttering about her kitchen and pouring him tea. His knees fold in large angles under her tiny chessboard of a table and _why am I even here,_ but he takes another sip anyway.

Her crinkled smirk unsettles him. He has a feeling that she knows it does; it's why she keeps doing it.

“Everybody hates me, Maz,” he tells her flatly, setting the tiny teacup down.

She suddenly picks it up.

He should have known. (More like she snatches it before he could react, and he wants to say _Don’t,_ wants to ask _After all these years, you still want to know?_ , wants to say many dark things that the well-worn centuries have fostered in his black heart _,_ but she has already peeked inside).

Maz hums. Whether it is directed to the future she sees in the tea leaves or directed at his general person, he doesn't know. He'd rather not know anyway. 

“Believe it or not, _Solo_ , I've heard that one before,” she tells him. It sounds almost fond. He hates it.

She looks at him then. Really looks at him. (He doesn't squirm, but only out of principle.)

"Of course you have," he replies. More to the wall than to her. 

(He doesn’t bristle either; he doesn’t know what else he expected when he sat down in her kitchen again, for the first time in several hundred years.)

"Missing the point. As always." She is shaking her head, smiling to herself, even as she brings their teacups to the sink. He does not ask what she means. She and the stars can have their secrets, he’ll leave them to it. He has better things to do than ponder the inevitable.

.:.

_"Once upon a time, in a universe far, far away, there were gods. But there were a great many things that had existed too. Loneliness, longing. Love. The gods lived with all of these, struggled with them just as everyone else has had to. Indeed, life has always been life. Perhaps the only difference is that they’ve been doing this for longer.”_

_— excerpt from “The Sacred Texts” (author unknown), circa. 645 BC_

.:.

The tiny port town of Coruscant has never been a popular tourist site. It is, in its good months, the attractive but odd little sister of the more prominent East Coast towns; charming enough that you could overlook the strange sparkle that hung in the air, that quality that makes one say _I’ve never seen this place before, it’s quite nice,_ even though you might have, indeed, seen this place before. You just don’t remember.

This little-known spot on the map is certainly not terrible to drive through; it is not so _sleepy_ as it is S _unday-morning-lethargic_ , its bones creaking under the weight of ease, like the first few days of summer: a relatively _un_ -busy cityscape with fair midtown traffic, a healthy tree-to-vehicle ratio, diners, office buildings, polite pedestrians with a walking speed faster than the national average. Summer made it more surreal, the air crackling with sunshine, the ground humming with contentment. (Or, perhaps, vibrating with the untapped and the unknown, pulsing with tension. Depends on who you ask.)

Crime rates are said to be ridiculously low for the central business hubs, inversely proportional to the shocking rising cost of honey and pomegranates, says the local papers, while gas prices coast safely on a plateau. Most of the townsfolk agree. (Or more accurately: most townsfolk don’t know any better.)

On such an occasion as a good and warm June day, locals like to visit a strip of small shops and buildings, a little detour off downtown, along Alderaan Ave., known as the Old Republic. This area paid homage to Coruscant’s colourful history; the shopfronts wearing battle-scar badges made of a mishmash of architectural choices, buildings looking to have been built anytime between the Pilgrims' settlement and eighty years into the future. A landscape of strangeness.

(It has been said that Coruscant's earliest settlers had not, in fact, come from across the pond, but had come from across a river. One that stands between life, and the things that are barely living. Old wives' tales, of course. Coruscant has no shortage of old wives.)

At one end of the Old Republic is Qui-Gon Street, where a quaint brownstone cafe called Ahch-To Coffee sits.

Rey does not know where the name came from, and she doesn’t have her grandfather to ask about it anymore.

But the name is moot point; it could be called any order of random letters, and she’d _still_ fight tooth and nail to keep it running as best she could. Which is why she is now distressed that the tip jar is empty.

_How is the tip jar empty already?_

She scrambles the loose change on the counter, as though rearranging the coins and bills would magically multiply their sum. _No, no, this can't be_. The dull yellow light of the back room is unflickering and still, a complete contrast to her skittering distress. She closes her eyes, wracks her brain through the day:

A few regulars hadn’t come around earlier, like Luke and Amilyn. And it’s a Tuesday, which is one of their slowest days, but today had been even slower than usual. Terribly, painfully slow. Almost like the sun had woken up feeling _not quite_ up to the task of orbiting the planet; Rey had found herself questioning the hours and whoever’s in charge of making them go. No, today was not stellar at all.

She sighs a gentle curse, a silent prayer-plead for her lucky stars to throw her a bone, if only as a birthday gift. Having to deal with Plutt is bad enough; she detests even _thinking_ about how it would go if her rent were delayed, as difficult as it had already been to catch up with his monthly increases.

Life is not fair. But she isn’t one with a habit of complaining.

So she carries the weight — the little nudge of _not enough, this isn’t enough —_ as she makes her way back to her apartment.

The backstreets of downtown Coruscant is an infrastructural graveyard, where quaintness fades into the decaying skeleton of what could have been. But Rey pays no mind to her surroundings, walking home under the row of streetlights, shuddering past the closed shop on the ground floor of her complex, picking up her feet as she makes her way upstairs, avoiding the creaks of the worn staircase to get to the housing units on the second floor. 

She sneaks into her apartment at the end of the hall, shuts the door behind her quietly and quickly, twists the knob of the deadbolt she had installed three years ago when she learned what kind of neighbourhood she could afford while running a barely-bankrupt coffee shop in a town that doesn’t get many visitors.

She pushes her purse onto whatever small space is left on top of her small dining table overrun with knick-knacks—mostly scavenged materials like pots, wholesale beans, notebooks filled with business doodahs and supplier contacts. Things for the cafe. Over-read books, their spines begging for a mercy killing, piled high beside Rey's frameless mattress on the floor, while a small potted snake plant sat in the corner, waiting for next daylight - the only green in the mess. There are shoes and socks, the plastic and cardboard carcasses of many a microwaved dinner, coffee-stained mugs left in the trail of a busy girl's routine; one who lived alone, and had no intention of entertaining visitors in the foreseeable future.

Rey's apartment bears the mark of her living: untouchable chaos.

She sighs. It feels like twenty-five years’ worth of waiting rushing out of her lungs. For what, she’s not sure. But when she looks around her and feels an impermanence, it is a painful sort of expectant hope nonetheless.

.:.

_“History is a funny invention. Take greek mythology for example; we look at the texts and sites discovered in the last decade, we find that the legends place_ _Aphrodite having birthed Artemis and Apollo, continuing a cursed godline. Where did that come from? I don’t know, but I didn’t make that up, it’s in a majority of the original Sumeric texts. A few other texts tell the story of how Artemis had married Orion, who had died at the hands of his own son. There are countless versions, a web of endless myths, after that. Who knows how the story truly goes? Who knew we had it wrong all along?_

_But the real question is: Would it change anything if the stories we told didn’t reflect the truth, as much as they reflected us?_

_I have said this before, but I say it again: Mythology and History are a masterclass in fiction. The truth is often a little more cognitively dissonant, because reality_ does _make narrative sense… just not in the way we expect."_

_— Mace Windu, in an unpublished correspondence with “The Daily Resistance”, August 2004_

.:.

A whisper of dark smoke transfigures into a man, clad in black like his clothing, walking purposefully towards Dex’s Diner on a sunny June midday. The door chime rings him in, and while his presence commands attention, no one in the diner seems to notice, not even in busy downtown Coruscant. He slips into his usual booth, where Kylo Ren is already eating his pancakes. On the man's side are lukewarm waffles and eggs, black coffee, and yesterday’s paper _,_ looking fresh off the press with pages completely unread.

There is no preamble, no small talk or greeting. It is business as usual.

“How was Mexico?” Kylo asks him when he has taken his seat and first sip.

“Like expected. How was London?"

Kylo contemplates the question, his head tilting the tiniest fragment. “I didn’t know you knew about London.”

It was Cassian’s turn to throw him a look. “You do realise that it’s my job,” is said as a matter of fact while drizzling an unholy amount of syrup on his sunny-side eggs.

Kylo frowns. He’d nearly forgotten, that the god of the underworld is a walking dossier of the world’s most classified secrets. That's what happens when you have an all-access pass to the realm of the dead. And Cassian never was a man of too many words; there's a special sort of efficiency you learn when you’ve been running all of the afterlife for thousands of years, keeping hell in tiptop shape and dispensing due justice and reward to every living soul, _ever_.

Of course Cassian would know where he’s been. Well, _that,_ and the fact that the lord of hell is essentially his guardian, as per his eternal sentence.

Quite ironic, really.

They skip the part where Cassian tries to prod him about the Titans, and the part where Kylo tries to prod him about Olympus. They’ve skipped it for centuries now, it’s become quite the running joke.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Cassian reminds him, a glint in his eye.

“No. No, I didn’t.”

They are cut from the same star, they are.

Settling in companionable silence, both weather their lunch in an impasse of sorts. But a few minutes later, the diner hums, suddenly, alive with a spark that only the gods know to be another one of theirs, coming into their radius. Kylo recognizes the energy signature well enough. She marches straight towards their booth with an intimidating grace. 

“I thought I might find you here. Hello, Ren,” the girl says, eyes trained at Cassian only. “We need to talk about Scarif,” she adds, a conversation in a look, one they've had eons to perfect.

“What about Scarif?” Cassian asks, and if Kylo didn’t know him any better, he’d say he was unbothered. But he sees Cassian absently reach for the frayed end of Jyn’s sleeve, and he hates that he notices.

Only then do Jyn's eyes flit briefly to Kylo. “Not here. Privately."

Kylo almost laughs, but it comes out as a scoff. Cassian excuses himself as he follows his wife out the diner to discuss one of the nine circles of hell under their care. Leaving Kylo with an inexplicable bout of wistfulness.

.:.

That evening, Kylo doesn’t dream about the usual forest.

Instead, it is a desert. As far as the eye can see, and small footsteps that stretch on and on into the furthest horizon. The infinity of it, the way the little dots on the sand seem to have no end… _No, this isn’t right._ Little flickers of… what, he does not know, starts in his chest and it feels like friction burn and frostbite inside him all at once, and _it isn’t right_. 

He follows the footsteps that seem to have traveled so far, _too far, too long, too heavy, where are you going?_ But he stops.

He stops when a blankness envelopes him without warning, like the embrace of negative space. His hollowness, turned inside-out...

_Lost._ He is lost, and the feeling is unfamiliar and haunting. Almost as if the feeling itself didn’t belong to him.

Nothing about this sun-drenched nightmare is easy to consume, so he uses all of his divinity to change the scene, _control and focus and control again, shape, create and recreate,_ until he finally latches onto the scent of wild daffodils and moss, of a dozen butterflies, of wisps of dark hair and dimples belonging to a face he’d never get to see. 

This, this is familiar. _This_ is the hell he knows.

Rationally, he is aware that this girl in his dreams— his recurring, torturous dream— is merely the manifestation of a curse; that this “she” is no more real than his innocence. He knows that these sequences— the skin, the freckles, amber-green eyes, the stories she seems to tell him, what could have been, what _should_ have been, the unbearably sharp longing— are part and parcel of a punishment. The stars can be cruel and he can take it. He’s not a coward.

It doesn’t stop him from reaching out anyways, knowing he'd wake up before he ever could touch her. 

He does not wake up, however. Not today, apparently.

Instead, the forest unfurls into a meadow before his eyes, familiar and haunting and _No, not this. Anything but this_.

Thunder cracks and he looks down where the pool of blood looks brown in the sudden twilight. He looks at his hands; they are running with ribbons of it, red crawling up its bones and calluses and tremors, red streaking his pale skin, red like his sins tangling around his fingers.

It’s then that he wakes up, eyes unfocused. Hands clean, but still shaking. 

The weight of the dreamscape sits on his chest: the lingering smell of blood and incoming rain, his breathing trying to catch up to his runaway heart.

( _Weakness_ is what he hears with every flicker of ache, shame echoing in what the dream has scraped from the bottom of his chest. _You inhuman child, you pathetic monster._

_Rule yourself and rise, boy. You will never be worth more than your darkness._ )

To cope with the ghosts of the nightmare, he burns his ceiling.

It starts to blaze, set alight by his power and instincts. ( _Too much of your father in you, weakling._ ) The fire continues above him, he can feel the heat on the skin of his nose, the acrid yellow brightness straining his eyes. ( _You will never be as worthy as your grandfather. You will never live up to your godline._ ) He rides the rise and fade, burns through the ache with the blank determination of a man who has done this many, many times before. ( _You are not, and will never be, worthy._ )

It stops as soon as he tastes the ashes, and his room is large but it is all smoke now, contained only by the sheer force of his powers. It had been thirty seconds at most, but he can feel years draining from him from the exercise.

( _Rage is power, boy. Learn how to use it. Gods know it might be all that you’re good for._ )

The ceiling holds, not a single crack on its black surface. It holds, but only barely.

.:.

_“Love has always been tied with War. It has always been this duality. The thin line between passion and rage. Some scholars had even said that Eros was designed to be Ares, reborn, or that the greco-roman translations had merely been misspellings. Whichever case it is, I’m more inclined to believe that there is at least a truth to this connection, no matter how minute."_

_— “Stardust: The Untold History of The Constellations” (2012), by Chirrut Îmwe_

.:.

_Perhaps he's wearing a cape today._

He looks like he might be, Rey thinks. Of the way the light sculpts monsters projected on her apartment wall, and she wonders why she has always seen the dark figures as masked, and tall. Why she sees them move sometimes, like picture shows that have no story.

“It’s a bit early for you to haunt me, isn’t it?” she murmurs from underneath her covers, well into the night. She does speak to the shadows sometimes. Or rather, the Shadow. She calls it that, perhaps, because it’s easier to conjure up a creature in a mask than it is to face the loneliness that seems to follow her around.

She pretends she hears him sigh.

“No, I didn’t. Today was…,” she replies to an imaginary question whispered to the wind. She’d ask him as well, about his day, and if he’d had lunch with Hades, and if he’d been to her home town recently. She assumes so, she had dreamt it some time last week. But she’s not quite dreaming yet, so she is silent.

She imagines him to be pensive and lost in thought; a good listener, if not dark and a little moody. In descent to sleep, she could see him, almost, shoulders heavy with the weight of the world, a figure cut out of forgotten nightmares.

( _A heart bleeding with suppressed sentiment, a brokenness etched in his bones..._ )

Summer breeze blows into her room from the open window, and she’s laughing to herself. How silly she is, she thinks, to find solace in an imaginary friend. The shadows seem to respond to her, dark shapes moving on her wall, but she is not afraid of them, and hasn’t been in a long time. 

On most days, the dark feels more home than anything.

She amuses herself with her inner monologue before tiredly falling asleep. 

In her dreams, she is in the desert, wandering. Always wandering, walking from dune to dune in the scorch of midday, looking for a place to barter for belonging. In her dreams, she will often stumble into a forest in the desert. Where she’ll find a black figure, the favorite figment of her psyche. She’ll talk to him, for hours and hours. On some nights, in some dreams, she almost forgets she's only talking to herself.

But tonight is different. Tonight, she stumbles upon not the usual shape of her loneliness.

The man she sees in the forest is older. Much older. She finds him leaning against a tree trunk, as though already waiting for her. His worn-through clothing, the tattered leather jacket and grey hair, aren’t familiar. But when he sees her, he smiles, and _there_. There’s the familiarity in his expression, even if she can’t put her finger on it. His clothing is also strange, like he were somehow taken from a different dream of hers, a long time ago.

“Do I know you?” Rey asks sincerely. Does she?

“No. But it sure as hell good to see you,” the man replies. His voice is low, and much to Rey’s surprise, reminds her of the voice of her Shadow. Her subconscious is really stepping up the storytelling, she thinks.

They talk, as Rey is warrant to do when she meets someone in her dreams in the forest. He asks her about her life, her work, her little coffee shop at the end of Qui-Gon Street. She obliges him, enjoys the little time she spends with someone who is willing company. 

Light trickles through the forest canopy, casting the man’s features in green and gold watercolour as they converse about Rey’s life. _We must be old friends,_ Rey thinks. There is a fondness here, she’s sure of it, as her heart fills with what must be her own manufactured nostalgia. Even if she is aware, in some distant part of her consciousness, that she is alone and always has been. Until:

“Listen, kid, I don’t have much time,” the stranger says, after her particularly long story about her best friends’ engagement, “But I want you to remember that you’re not alone, alright?"

Something unravels at Rey’s chest. When she looks down, her fingers are all tangled up in red string.

_I'm not?_

She doesn't want it, but it comes anyway: a warmth. A strangled, inexplicable hope. A hand reaching out to her, and she reaches back...

It is gone in a brief moment, just as fast as it came.

It is only when she opens her eyes that she feels the echo of his words, and tears start falling, and they continue to fall until they pool in her ears and the discomfort makes her look at her phone. She has woken up ahead of her alarm; it is far too early but she gets up anyway, trying her best to commit the dream to memory, like a promise she hopes will be kept.

.:.

Morning found him more brittle and unsavoury than he usually is. Hux tells him as much.

“You’re losing your touch, Ren,” he says, swiping away the blood that drips from his nose with his handkerchief, before it has the chance to crust black in the cold.

Kylo does not dignify the statement with a response.

Earlier, Kylo had manifested at the frigid center of a fourth dimension realm mostly known as _star killer,_ after the fact that this no-man’s-land is where divinity comes to die. The white-blue atmosphere, thick forests, and occasional sub-zero snowstorms made it unbearably uninhabitable, even for the gods. Perfect for Titan occupation, and other fourth dimension beasts that are similarly less than _life-inclined_.

Kylo had every intention of ignoring anything that would assault him as he made his way to Base, but alas.

Armitage Hux had already been there, necromancing his way with a particularly savage acklay. Kylo could see Hux's tactical prowess and manic sadism in the patches and tendrils of darkness, manoeuvring around the monster, driving it mad with fury. 

So he’d done what any killjoy would: he manifested his blade and strode over to strike the acklay in one very efficient blow. (If only to spite Hux, and put an end to the torture of the killer beast.) At least, it was _supposed_ to be efficient; his blade sliced cleanly, but as he turned around, a force of dark energy pummelled him backwards on the chest and the claw strike missed him by a foot. 

The beast tumbled dead in a heap, its guts spilling from the vertical cut, one of its claws embedded in the snow where Kylo’s torso _would have_ been.

Now, their breaths come out in fogs, and Hux is glaring at him with all the collective shade of the world’s dark forces.

“I take it you’ve spoken to the Supreme Leader about the Alignment?” Kylo asks, when he has gathered himself off the snow.

“Spoken? _He’s not even here_.” Hux’s snide response sounds utterly disgusted that Kylo Ren, right hand of Divine Titan and Supreme Leader of the Fourth Dimension's First Order, does not know where their boss is.

“Then what are you—"

“I’ve been entrusted his estates. He’s decided to stay in the Third for a while longer,” Hux replies. 

“And a fine job you’re doing,” Kylo comments, shaking the snow off his clothes.

“So says the god whose life I just saved."

Kylo sneers. Hux smirks. They both stand over the giant, gutted crustacean, until one of them breaks the silence:

“Careful, Ren. If I didn’t enjoy seeing you suffer through your eternal damnation, this—” he kicks at the limp claw, “would be in your chest right now.

“Let me send you a fruit basket,” comes out sounding more dead than the beast itself. 

They stalk on their own separate ways, Hux towards Base and Kylo towards anywhere else. 

Hux is lying, of course. Kylo knows, perhaps the only reason Armitage Hux, one of the most powerful sorcerers in the last millennia, hasn’t killed him yet is because actions like that have consequences from the stars. Even black magic cannot upturn the universal laws of balance.

.:.

_“How many dimensions are there?_

_“If you were to look at a point, a dot of existence, it would be comprised of our mathematical base matter: one dimension. We are, of course, made up of innumerable points, spanning the x, y, and z axes. We are three-dimensional._

_“But what if I were to say that there was a fourth dimension? That beyond what our senses can perceive as three-dimensional realities, there are forces and beings and creatures that exist outside the realm of our limited, human experience? These are the kinds of questions, I think, that are unscientific, and absolutely necessary."_

_— from the foreword of “The Argonauts”, a novel by W. Antilles_

.:.

“Two souls? _Two?"_

“Keep your voice down, Keigh."

“Are you certain?” Keigh's properly straight back stiffens up even straighter, if possible. His arms fold in front of him as he reclines. “I can give you at least eighty-six different possibilities that you are mistaken—"

“And I’ve ran them all,” Cassian says from behind a hand that aggressively passes over his harried, sleep-deprived face. 

“Doubtful. Certainly not the one wherein Jyn is colluding with the Titans and is actually—"

“ _Keigh_."

Cassian glowers at hell’s chief operations officer, the effect lessened by the eyebags and uneven stubble. They are best friends, certainly, but it has always been more out of necessity than any fond _feelings_ — for as anyone who knows Hades' hellhound would say: he has none. Where affection and emotion should be, there’s a bank of statistics and sarcasm and enough poor, tactless timing to drive a weaker god to true hell, pun well intended.

“ _Two?_ Are you absolutely positive?” Keigh sputters out, again, not hiding his doubts about Cassian’s arithmetic.

“It was only supposed to be one. But Jyn did a census. We are missing two. One from last week, another from… twenty-five years ago."

The beat that follows is grave. “Good _gods."_

_“_ I know, I know. Don’t remind me."

“That is a near _statistical impossibility._ I don’t know what to say, _”_ Keigh finally says after five seconds of contemplation, in the manner of someone who has accepted it in complete peace, sipping his tea in their little home base in fourth dimension Yavin. “We haven’t had unsanctioned escapes since… never. We have never had unsanctioned escapes, Cassian. It has never happened. Not once—"

“Yes, _I get it_ , thank you.” 

“Do you know who they are?"

“No, but Jyn and I have a few more months to figure it out."

“Ah, yes, of course. Better hurry. She’ll need to leave again soon."

Cassian says nothing, merely looks at a distant point above Keigh’s shoulder. 

.:.

_There is thunder, an angry sound, a reckoning, a final blow, and then silence. There is blood on his knuckles, a blade in his hands and it is dripping. It is glowing. It is crackling._

_It is not in his hands anymore, but on the ground, inside his father._

_There is a small disturbance inside him, but beyond that, emptiness._

_“Face me, boy. We have work to do."_

_Kylo Ren’s eyes snap up to the immortal in front of him, beside him, behind him, but never far away. He looks into the disfigured face of the Titan, who proceeds to detail another bidding, and he’s done this before, he’s seen this before, he has a thousand variations of this specific dream, not-dream, this vision-message, this curse. A thousand ways to atone for this life debt, a thousand deaths, a thousand ways to die. And only one way to live._

_He remembers every little detail about his next assignment from Snoke, but he takes it as though from out of his body, out of this shadowy meadow._

_The blood continues to drip from his hands, like veins that tangle around his fingers._

When Kylo Ren opens his eyes, it is sudden and jolting. It takes him a few minutes to reorient into the land of the living, before sitting up to write the details of Snoke’s bidding: something about needing to find an escaped soul.

* * *

_This one’s for the lonely child_

_Brokenhearted, running wild_

_This was written for the one to blame_

_The one who believes they are the cause of chaos and everything_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [EDIT: 23/12/19]  
> If you've seen TROS, know that I am hugging you right now. Thank you for reading, and I can promise this: I will do my best with this story.
> 
> [END EDIT]
> 
> Holy crap you have actually read that monster of a first chapter, thank you. Thank you for giving this story a chance. :) Let me know if I should continue this because omg wtf have I gotten myself into.
> 
> NOTES:
> 
> \-  Acklay
> 
> \- The Argonauts: A band of heroes in Greek mythology
> 
> \- Fun fact: Apollo had an antagonistic relationship with Eros.
> 
>  
> 
> come yell at me in tumblr and twitter! reyreyalltheway :)


	3. Millennium Alignments & Other Divine Inconveniences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein coffee orders are taken, the dead are visited, and we are introduced to a neurotic blogger.

It’s Rey’s birthday today.

Or at least, it’s the arbitrary date that her neighbour Maz had decided would mark her life’s yearly anniversary, and she’s kept to it since she moved to Coruscant five years ago. It’s not a big deal, _it isn’t,_ she insists, when Finn and Rose surprise her in the backroom kitchen of her coffee shop with an orange pumpkin cupcake and candles in roman numerals: XXV.

She is tearing up before she could question herself, and Rose is embracing her too much and it’s all _too much_ , really. She doesn’t deserve any of it.

“You shouldn’t have,” she chokes out inside Rose’s tight hug.

“Are you kidding?! We’ve been planning this for weeks!” Finn says.

(“ _He completely forgot_ ,” Rose whispers before releasing Rey to share a fond eyeroll about her fiancé.)

For a brief moment, Rey basks in the warmth of the only family she has ever known. Her eyes mist even as she blows out the candles and slices the cupcake into four tiny quadrants, insisting on sharing two pieces with Finn and Rose because she doesn’t know how to have things of her own. Not birthdays, and certainly not birthday cakes.

She takes five minutes, _five minutes only_ , she insists, because there are customers and Finn is not getting paid to eat pumpkin cupcakes, _Get back out there, slacker!,_ she yells as she flicks him with the end of the dishtowel on her shoulder. Rose stays behind, helping with a fresh batch of honey cookies from the oven.

“So, what’s your plan, birthday girl?” she asks, placing the hot tray on the counter and then hopping up on it herself.

Rey shoves an entire cupcake quarter in her mouth: “I dunno, didn’t really think about it,” she mumbles through her mouthful. Which is somewhat of a lie to cover up the pathetic truth: she expects to spend her birthday begging Plutt for an extension on the rental. 

“You should swing by our place! We could watch some Netflix and—”

“And catch you two getting bored within thirty minutes of not tearing each others’ clothes off? No, thanks. _”_ Rey knows better than to interfere with the newness of her best friends’ engagement, so she switches topic.

“I had a dream last night, by the way,” she starts to say mid-chew, and she sees Rose’s eye-roll smile, like _Here we go again,_ but fond and amused. Rey is about to counter with _No, it’s not the same dream!_ , when Rose starts on one of her famous tirades.

“You know, maybe you’d stop dreaming about broody forest guys,” Rose says, organising the new batch of cookies on the display tray, “if you actually, you know, went out there to meet real guys?! Like, _real people_ , Rey. Human beings in the flesh, preferably with rippling pectorals and a solid credit score and bonus points if he drives a hybrid and— _”_

Rose’s eyes bug out with a gasp, like she just got the most brilliant idea and Rey stops chewing because she knows Rose well enough to know it is most certainly _not_ a brilliant idea.

“Oh no,” Rey says with her mouthful.

“Oh my god, I just got the most brilliant idea—”

“Please don’t—”

“I'm setting you up! Finn was just telling me about the new guy at his— Oh my god, this is going to be so great, why didn’t I think of this before! Finn! Finn!...”

“Rose, no! Rose!” But alas, all of Rey’s pleading go unheeded as Rose scampers outside to set the display tray on the counter, interrupting Finn’s conversation with a customer to excitedly ask for the number of that one new colleague at Finn’s _other_ workplace. 

Rey resigns herself to watch their antics, the comfortable affection with which they interact, even in playful argument. Something that she will never admit to is the nudge of longing. The small, irrelevant sadness that she quiets down as she goes to the counter to tend to her morning customers.

“Morning, Bodhi! What’ll it be today?”

.:.

_The myths as we know them are wrong._

_The gods walk amongst us. But if you follow my blog, you already knew that. Any other day, I would be happy to do a metaphysical dissection on the implications of these superhumans amongst mortals like us, but not today._

_Today is special. Today, we talk about the Millennium Alignment._

_But in case you’ve forgotten, let’s start from the beginning._

_Once upon a time, as according to the Sacred Texts originally discovered in 1945, and consequently rediscovered in 1996 after having been MYSTERIOUSLY un-discussed before then, “Skywalker” is the name of the godline of Ares and Aphrodite, who were married and had twins: Apollo and Artemis. Artemis had married a hunter, Orion, and had a son. A son who, as according to various other texts, killed his father._

_Talk about family drama._

_(_ _Click here_ _to know more about the Sacred Texts mythology.)_

_And, get this: according to the texts AND OTHER sources, this *gasp* PATRICIDE happened during an astronomical phenomenon that scientists (yes, legitimate PhD doctors) have dubbed as the “Millennium Alignment”._

_Mathematically speaking, the alignment does happen. Which is BONKERS if you ask me, considering that these texts are god knows how ancient and there’s NO WAY whoever wrote it would have had access to the knowledge or tools to describe the stars with such detail... But the real clincher?_

* * *

~.:.~

 

 

>   
> — _But the real clincher? The next Alignment starts tonight, and you all know how much I love a good ritual._

“No, no, no, that’s not right,” the author mutters to himself as he pointedly backspaces, keyboard clicking loud in the semi-quiet, the old blue 7th floor office printer making a series of hums and whirrs, groaning for attention. 

 

 

> _—But the real clincher? The mathematical equivalent of the next “Alignment” starts happening again around tonight._

Bodhi Rook smiles, satisfied with the sentence he’s seeing on his Word document. He reaches for his coffee absently, but thoughts of his next paragraph overtake his motor skills and his hand tips his nearly-empty paper cup onto the mess of notes on his desk…

“Jesus christ, Rook,” comes a sudden voice from the woman who (disastrously) appears out of nowhere, leaning against his cubicle just in time to witness the sip of black coffee turn into a wet brown spot on his notepad. Ink unfurls, blurring words like _cyclops?_ and _child of chaos_ , and _don’t forget: laundry!_ in Bodhi’s chicken scratch.

“I’m sorry, oh god, I’m sorry—!” Bodhi claims the cup before it rolls off the edge of the desk, once again thanking the stars that it had not been full. He glances up to the woman and _whoops_. Jyn Erso, in charge of investigative journalism and feature articles, props herself beside his cubicle as the embodiment of the prosecution.

“What piece you working on there?” she asks, her accent crisp against the knowledge of catching him red-handed. Again.

“Hmm?”

“Bodhi…” sounds exasperated.

“Look, Jyn, I promise I’ll get you the Tarkin piece tomorrow— tonight! Okay, tonight! I promise I’ll get it to you tonight but please, please just let me post this one article— Just the one! My inbox is blowing up—”

“You’re not getting paid to write conspiracy articles and what-have-you, Rook,” Jyn firmly says, only with a hint of fondness that Bodhi doesn’t miss. She rolls her eyes and makes to leave, but throws a “You have until eight!” over her shoulder as she heads to the senior editors’ offices of _The Daily Resistance,_ one floor up.

“Eight-fifteen!” Bodhi shouts back, and he sees Jyn flipping him off with the hand not holding her own coffee cup. Being good friends with one’s editor has its perks.

“The queen caught you again, huh?” Bodhi hears from his left as Finn arrives to clock in some weekly hours, as mandatory for the part-timers. He settles into the adjacent cubicle, not hiding his eavesdropping. 

“I _hate_ it when she does that, like she has a sixth sense for slackers, I don’t know how she catches me every time…” Bodhi has started to type again, engrossed in his newest blog post.

.:.

_“What’s the big deal about Millennium Alignments anyway?” Ah, my dear readers, I am so glad you asked._

_See, according to the Sacred Texts, all of the universe is about balance._

_There are consequences. There are rules to be followed. The world goes a certain way round, and any other way would spell catastrophe._

_But, during Alignments, things can get a little “shifty”._

_(_ _Click here_ _to know more about the science behind the Alignment.)_

_Like a wildcard in the pre-ordained structure of the universe, a pre-appointed season for shit getting fucked up. For one  year, out of every thousand, the rules become more like ~guidelines~, and ANYTHING can happen. All bets are off, and who knows? Maybe we’ll get more god sightings, maybe portals open, maybe one or two creatures come out as aliens or something, I don’t know. But I’d be stalking social media these next few days, if I were you. There’ll be hoaxes here and there, sure, but all in all:_

_Exciting, isn’t it?_

* * *

~.:.~

Mandalore— one of the nine circles of hell— is known for its vicious spirit, a kind of ferocity you could smell like rust in the atmosphere. It lands in the Outer Rim of Hades, as one of the very first pitstops coming from the Nethers (that is, the Styx in oral tradition), and if you weren’t careful, you’d end up in a brawl before you got to your destination. Which would be manageable, at best, if you had no intention to return to the land of the living.

Traveling through the different dimensions was not difficult for a god of Kylo Ren's level. It’s a quick zip, a little rustling of your atomic properties, and you’ve successfully reoriented your base matter for the fifth dimension afterlife. It’s like teleportation, except with a bit of particle physics and cross-astral quantum mechanics involved.

It’s a different story for mere human sorcerers, however. No matter how powerful.

He gives Hux credit for his unflinchingly stoic face, even if the shade of his skin is a bit off.

“You’re not looking too good, General."

Hux lasts three solid seconds of standing upright, before doubling over in an effort to contain what Kylo assumes would be a very undignified incident. When he is done, and upright, and taking deep breaths through his nostrils having come from no less than a completely unnatural reorganisation of his physical being, Hux sneers: “I did not come here to be lectured, Ren."

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he replies even as they start walking towards their destination: the fort-city Keldabe, visible on the horizon above a black granite hill.   

“‘Course not. You’re too busy dreaming about your non-existent soulmate."

For all the pain in the ass that Armitage Hux is, he appreciates that the man can give as good as he gets.

A few more minutes of brisk walking and several competitively snarky exchanges later, Hux and Kylo find themselves standing before their destination. 

Keldabe sits behind black obsidian walls raging high into the bruising red-purple sky, beyond which, taller landmarks can be glimpsed— ruinous granite and steel spires, knives sticking out of the heart of the city, worn and ancient. Grey-orange smoke sifts upwards to join the haze of pollution rising from the eastern quadrant, but not much else visible past the wall, as though the city itself were a dare to outsiders looking for a fight.

An appropriate look, for one of the Titans’ territories.

The two of them take a moment to appreciate.

“If it didn’t make my cells feel like they were swimming in lead, I rather think it was worth it, coming here,” Hux comments in a voice smaller than the one he usually sports. 

The city’s massive gates draw open, and Kylo and Hux head in the direction of the city square, in the western quadrant, ignoring the organised chaos, the flurry of dead souls bustling about with their energy fields, existing as per the eternity sentenced to them.

 _Hell can be an eternity of blind aimlessness,_ Kylo remembers Cassian once telling him. He can relate.

“Any progress on the soul?” Hux casually asks, as he uses his powers to forcefully shove incoming passers-by to the side. The city can get a little crowded on weekdays.

“What soul?”

“The one that escaped from the Fifth. Or are you aging now to the point of forgetfulness?” Hux flicks away a particularly violent pedestrian.

Kylo wasn’t aware that they had both been given the same task. He internally sighs. He hates having to watch out for a highly competitive Hux trying to one-up him in every assignment.

“As you said. It’s been two days,” he replies, letting Hux draw conclusions from that as he will.

“Hmm. Right then,” the sorcerer says, and Kylo can already feel Hux’s mind turning. He didn't lie. But he’s not about to tell Hux about his plans to head back to Coruscant to confront one of his informants later that day. A flash of Snoke’s directive comes back to him, verbatim:

_Bring the soul to me, dead or alive. Preferably alive. But if it be dead, I leave it to your creativity._

He wants to finish this assignment as quickly as possible. In all the centuries that he has murdered, slain, and stolen in the name of the First Order, all the years of being the right hand of the Titan, he has never before wanted to get rid of an assignment so quickly.

By gods, he is tired. So, _so_ tired.

The progression of this bone-chilling tiredness had been the subject of his recent visit to Maz Kanata, which was a first, even for him. He had come to inquire of the seer if there were any new words about him from the stars. Like a visit to the doctor, feeling all too childish for asking: _Am I (finally) dying? Is the curse getting worse? Is there a new consequence I should know about? It’s the Alignment_ _for gods’ sakes_ , _just give it to me straight, I can take it._

 _Nope. Nothing’s changed,_ she had said as she steeped their tea. Even with the stars aligning for the first time this side of the millennium, there have been no changes to his curse. Which had been frustrating to hear. It would seem that Hux is right: perhaps this strange pull of spiritual exhaustion _is_ simply him ageing towards supernatural senility. 

How awfully appropriate.

His thoughts break upon Phasma’s greeting as they enter Keldabe’s renowned tavern, _Oyu'baat_ , alongside the smell of rotting wood and the pronounced musk of the afterlife. A hush descends upon their entrance. What afternoon light that filters down into the tavern from outside is supported by a red-orange glow made by black magic, and Kylo, not for the first time in his long life, finds himself irritable in the atmosphere.

“Kylo Ren. How good of you to grace us with your presence today,” Phasmadora Scyre says, sarcasm barely detectable, but still very much there. 

Her chrome-silver pantsuit and slicked-back blonde hair rip right out of the pages of a magazine editorial, but Kylo doesn't think much of it. He has seen his fair share of sorcerers, overdressed during excursions to other dimensions.

“Snoke’s directive, not my idea. I suggest you not get used to it,” he replies, finding a corner of the tavern vacated immediately for him. He takes a seat on a worn wooden stool by the bar.

“Phasmadora,” Hux greets.

“Armitage,” Phasma replies.

Kylo does not know if the two sorcerers are aware that he can read their energy signals well enough. Normally, he'd resist the urge to gag, but today, he simply looks away. The Knights of Ren and the council of the First Order pay attention, as Hux starts.

“Right then, down to business. As you all know, the Alignment starts tonight. This marks the first time in a thousand years that the constellations become unstable again…”

As Hux speaks about the Alignment, about the golden opportunity to secure more territories for the First Order, Kylo Ren hears a gentle whisper, a smattering of energy, glancing his awareness.

It is gone as quickly as it had come. Kylo turns his head, tries to pay more attention to the energies around him. The Knights notice this, and even Hux and Phasma pause during their briefing.

“Something the matter, Commander?” Hux asks.

“Continue,” he dismisses.

Strange occurrences are known to crop up during Alignments, after all. He chocks it up to a moment of distraction on his part. But he keeps his divinity alert anyway. The stars like to mess with the gods once in a while.

* * *

~.:.~

Calm, like soft humming in her lungs, spreads through her chest when she inhales. 

That’s how Rey knows that Amilyn Holdo is on her way to their cafe. She tells Rose as much, and not five minutes later, the front-door bells tingle with Amilyn’s arrival. Rose merely shakes her head.

“I have no idea how you always do that, but it is both cool _and_ creepy,” she says as she wipes down the counter at Ahch-To Coffee.

And it is true that Rey has, during strange spots in her life, found herself with instincts bordering on the supernatural. Just enough to know when her drunk foster father would come home, or when her negligent foster mother would be gone. Just enough for her to keep going, even if it bruised or bent her up along the way.

In those painful years, being passed around from one house to the next, she had learned to recognise the sensations, nudges here and there, more out of necessity than anything else. She wouldn’t have survived this long without it.

But it wasn’t always survival. Sometimes, it was darkness.

She sensed it in her first foster home, back in London; the “feel” of that house was like a fat glob of dysfunction sitting on the furniture, wrongness clinging to the living spaces. 

And it called to her. _Orphan Girl,_ it said. _Lonely One, Abandoned One. Lost Scavenger,_ it seemed to say, speaking to the part inside her that stretched infinitely, black and empty. The part of her that _longed_. For something, maybe a future, or the vague shape of it at least. 

More than anything, it spoke to the part of her that craved a reason to fight back. 

But it spoke only in very small ways, and never in fullness. As though she could hear a whisper, but never the words. (Never enough to follow it. Never enough to ask _How do you know me?,_ and receive a response.)

But Rey could also feel life, and light, and a _rightness;_ she felt it often, and _that_ was easy enough to follow.

“Here you go! Honey latte, just the way you like it,” Rey tells Amilyn as she hands her her order.

She has always been fond of Holdo. The purple-haired journalist— _war correspondent,_ she recalls Finn telling her; _the definition of badass, purple hair notwithstanding—_ had something like a secret wisdom about her. 

“Thank you, dear,” Amilyn says, before turning to go— and then pausing, as though she forgot something. She turns back to Rey with a quirk on her brow and a downwardness to her expression. “Something’s different about you,” she says, not a question, not exactly. But she fixes Rey with a look like a blank that Rey should be filling in.

“Oh?” Rey says.

There is a pause, and something strange happens: Rey feels Holdo’s question, rather than hears it. _What’s happening here?_ seems to hang in the air between them, verbatim, but to no one in particular. Certainly not Rey.

“Beg your pardon?” Rey asks, even though she didn’t hear anything. At all.

And yet…

Holdo shakes her head, lavender curls bobbing around her face. “Sorry, nothing, dear. Don’t mind me. Just stressed out at work,” Holdo smiles.

“Sorry to hear that,” Rey says, observing that there’s no queue, and there’s no rush, really. “How’s everything at the _Resistance_?”

Holdo pauses, lips hovering at the steaming mouth of her to-go cup. “Let’s just say, you can expect more of us needing extra doses of caffeine in the next few months.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Depends on how one looks at it,” Holdo shrugs, smiling.

Rey chuckles, and Holdo briefly touches her arm where it is resting over the counter. “Take care of yourself, Rey,” she says, before taking off.

But what Rey perceives, unspoken and lingering in the air, is the word _today. Take care of yourself, today most especially,_ was what Holdo really meant, and Rey finds it strange that she knows this, but she does.

And maybe it feels too ominous, all things considered. It _is_ her birthday after all.

.:.

The brief coffee break allows Amilyn Holdo to make several observations. The first being that the Millennium Alignment is most certainly entering its full effect. She can feel it, her senses amplified and morphing, even here in the supposed neutrality of the third dimension.

Secondly, the owner of her favorite coffee shop has gotten a very interesting energy signature...

“Αθήνα?” 

She hears her ancient name croaked out by Hades, who is giving off the aura— and the physical appearance— of a workaholic manager plagued by an unsolvable workplace crisis.

“Sorry, I was listening, I promise,” Athena replies, setting her coffee cup thoughtfully on the conference room table, where the rest of the five meeting attendees patiently wait for her input. She glances at them briefly, reading their signatures in a split second, noting the way Jyn— _Περσεφόνη,_ she thought fondly of the blue-eyed queen of the underworld— would be tapping an impatient finger on the flat surface of the table were it not for her husband subtly clasping her hand beneath.

She ponders the lovers’ gesture, the well-oiled gears of her ancient mind spinning.

“Two souls, you say?” she asks the two reigning gods of the fifth dimension afterlife. Hades nods as Persephone fixes her eyes on her, hanging on to her every word. “Well, isn’t that something.”

Then she takes a sip of her coffee, adding nothing else to the discussion. If her unconcern were surprising, only one of them is bold enough to mention it:

“Something you’re not telling us there, Holdo?” Hercules asks, the way he has been known to be impatient and urgent as she is wise and mysterious.

“If I did, it would ruin the knowing _,_ ” she tells him. “But yes, I do have a few theories.”

“Care to share to the class?”

“Not particularly, no. I think we have more pressing matters to attend to, considering the Alignment—”

“As much as I trust your judgement as I’ve seen you apply your infinite fountain of wisdom across the centuries, I have to disagree with that,” Hercules says, giving vent to his passionate self as he leans his palms over the table, half standing up to address the group, and Athena almost rolls her eyes if she weren’t so fond of the trigger-happy god. Hercules continues: 

“It’s the first time we’ve had an unsanctioned breakout of not one, but _two_ souls from the Fifth, right about the same time as the one year we’re vulnerable to the Titans. Couple that with the rumours of a weapon—”

“Weapon?” Artemis asks from where she is reclined at the head of the table. Back when it mattered, the gods would have balked at someone from the Skywalker godline being chosen to lead the pantheon. Today, not a single one of them here— and every other deity and their mother— would balk if Artemis asked them to follow her into the great beyond. 

Such were the Skywalkers: a condensed, walking history of the word 'ironic'.

“It’s not confirmed,” Persephone speaks up, releasing Hades’ hand from underneath the table to wave her hands on the oak surface, creating a mirage with her divine magic. “But we have heard rumours that the Titans are harbouring a weapon, or a, a key, of some sort. It’s not yet clear. Keigh is looking into the rumours as we speak, but… the Titans have been busy.” The mirage starts to show two figures, entering Mandalore’s infamous city.

 _A sorcerer and a god walk into a fortress…_ Holdo curiously ponders.

Hercules winces, visibly turns away. Artemis’ eyes turn glassy staring at the mirage. A weight settles over the room. Persephone hangs her head as she dismisses the images. The rest of what happens inside Keldabe is hidden from their divinity, as is common for anywhere under Titan dominion.  

“How is he?” Hercules asks Hades, who is the only one of them technically allowed to have contact with the exiled son of Olympus.

“About as good as you can expect,” Hades replies. He doesn’t add to the implied weight of _that_ backstory.

“Do you,” Hercules starts, sighs, then plows on: “Do you think you can get a little more out of him than the usual?”

“No,” Hades plainly replies. “We don’t talk about that. He’d see it from a mile away,” he says, glancing at the sad, lost expression on Artemis’ face. “You know how it works. We’ll have to find another way in.”

“It’s the souls. The _souls_ are our way in. There is no way that they’re not connected to this. They’re our best leads. I say we find them,” Hercules insists.

“And how do you propose we do that?” Athena asks. “You know we’re blind to Titan workings.”

There’s a frown on Hercules’ face, right before he blinks, and the figurative light bulb goes off, his energy signature bursting like his expression. Hercules may not be known for his strategic wit, but he does have his moments.

“ _We_ might be blind, but humans aren’t.” He turns to Hades who, back in the war-torn era between the ancients, has been known to run with the kind of tactical prowess that both sides would kill for: “What say you, Cass? Think maybe a recon in the Third might give us some leads?”

Hades’ hands are crossed over his chest, his gaze trained at something far, deep in thought. “It could work,” he replies, but then locks eyes with Hercules. “Just make sure you keep the humans in the dark. The Alignment is unpredictable; I don’t want more danger than is strictly necessary.”

“Only necessary danger, got it.” Hercules winks, and Hades almost regrets it.

* * *

~.:.~

Occasionally, Kylo Ren likes to walk.

Not that he can’t, but his work as the not-so-secret right hand of the Titans has had him zipping away and manifesting at wherever he needed to be, no matter the dimension, undetected by mere mortals. So there was never any need for rudimentary travel.

But tonight, under the clear skies, under those wretched stars, he makes his way to the dwelling of one Unkar Plutt. A cyclops, disguised by black magic amongst humans; greedy, slimy bastards, the lot of them. He’s had the distinct displeasure of having to deal with cyclops before, and he does not look forward to it.

However, his intelligence sources— and a strange hunch he has no reason to believe— suggested that, when it comes to scavenging for information on unofficial whereabouts, Unkar is the man to start with.

Kylo paces the length of Alderaan Avenue, his hands in his pockets in the cold and quiet of twilight, observing the trees and parked cars lining the road, prodding with his powers to test the area’s invisible boundaries for lurkers, or unwanted eyes. Other cyclops. Or the Sith, most especially. He reaches out his fingers, but instead of darkness, he feels the riffs of divine magic that hangs the air with peace. It’s a familiar energy, the very same one that used to cover over their home in fourth dimension Chandrila.

A breeze wafts from the northwest. He closes his eyes, feels centuries of grief taper to a harrowing point in his chest. He swallows the grief down, and heads purposely towards the seedier side of downtown Coruscant.

.:.

Most of the time, Rey walks everywhere.

She walks to and from work, she walks to visit her friends. Her life is made of walking, because she likes to keep her world within a good walkable radius. She also very much likes the specific radius she’s made of herself, spanning from Alderaan Ave. to Qui-Gon St., even to a bit past the edge of the Old Republic. These are where the most important parts of her life are: the cafe, Finn and Rose’s place, Maz’s little inn. 

But what she doesn’t enjoy is walking in the area of Concord Avenue, downtown. Where her apartment complex is.

For some weird reason that Finn will definitely laugh at if she mentioned it, the air is different here. Not literally, not in any way that she can physically sense it. But she wraps her cardigan more snugly around her shoulders anyway, even if the night isn’t that chilly. She makes her way to the compound. The one with the “Jakku Electronics” shopfront, scum-yellow signage alight and dull. She pauses, takes a deep breath. A very, very deep breath.

_Calm down, you can do this. You have no choice. You can do this..._

And with this mantra, she determines to walk in and convince Plutt that she just needs one more week to catch up to his admittedly ridiculous rent.

The first thing she notices, however, is that Plutt isn’t manning the shop out front.

The second thing she notices is that the backroom lights are open.

The third thing she notices is a small, subtle shift in the vibe of the place. A current of energy, a distinct wash of _something,_ humming on a frequency off the bandwidth. There are voices, and an eerie glow to the weak white lighting of the shop. Everything about right now is telling her that tonight is not a good idea to speak to Plutt. Her fight-or-flight response reasons for her to go home upstairs, close her apartment door, and not open it. For anyone.

But she keeps walking forward, as though pulled by time and space. She can hear a scuffle, two men speaking in hushed tones, just as she turns the corner to the back.

She peers around, and there, in the messy, dusty old backroom is Plutt, pinned up against his storage boxes, and a man whose back is turned to her. The dull white lights flicker. 

Plutt has only one eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!!
> 
> NOTES:
> 
> \-  Keldabe: Renowned city in Mandalore [Star Wars] 
> 
> \- Oyu'baat: A cantina of sorts in Keldabe [Star Wars]
> 
> \- The River Styx: river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead [Greek Mythology]
> 
> \- Nine circles of hell: Referenced from Dante's Inferno
> 
> \- Some names are in Greek


	4. A Word on First Impressions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a semi-kidnapping, but for less-than-nefarious reasons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Implied sexual harassment (mentioned; non-explicit)

 

Rey is many things.

But if there’s one thing that she is, she’s a survivor.

From foster home to foster home, to her recent days as a working adult in a city that doesn’t belong to her, Rey hasn’t met a fight that she hasn’t survived. Her twenty-five years of existence has built in her enough backbone to stomach all of life’s harsh realities.

Except, this isn’t reality. This can’t possibly be real.

Rey blinks, stunned. There he is, Unkar Plutt, a man she’s known for five years, staring back at her with one-eyed surprise, the lone eyeball unnaturally large, like a shiny billiard ball in the middle of his forehead.

She could swear on her grandfather’s grave that he used to have two eyes. 

Like a normal human being. 

Alas, he —  _ it? _ — blinks right back at her. She drops her purse and starts to back away.

_ Run.  _

So stunned is she that she barely registers the other man in the room, whose hand is outstretched towards Plutt, as though magnetically holding him up against the backroom boxes. The same man who happens to turn around just in time to see her backing away from the scene.

_ Run. _

Her eyes are locked on to that one, solitary eyeball, its red-gold irises glowing and sinister, almost hypnotic in its horror. Every hair on her body stands on end. Her heart starts to jackhammer behind her breastbone. She backs away, slowly, still caught by the sight of Plutt's wild, erratic iris, but when her legs bump against the shelves behind her, her body kicks into flight mode.

_ Run! _

* * *

~.:.~

He feels it first before anything else: a subdued energy signature, a spark, a flicker. Somewhere in the vicinity. His mind tries to reach out for it, read it, position it, but inexplicably, he cannot. So he focuses on the task at hand.

"Vi linibar at jorhaa'ir. Ni linibar kar'tayl teh gar,” Kylo says instead, reading the energies that Unkar is vibrating with: all shades of spite, generously lined by a contempt that borders on foolishness. 

“Slanar at haran, aruetii. _Skywalker,”_ is the reply he receives, alongside a forceful spit at his shoes. That ticks him off.

Then again, really. What else was he expecting after barging into a slimeball’s den, unannounced?

The lights flicker when he reaches out his hand: he mentally picks up the massive cyclops and shoves him against a densely-packed stack of boxes, off to the side of the room. Kylo moves to stand before the cyclops, Unkar’s head a few inches above his own, pinned up against the boxes by the force of his angry magic. Unkar remains resolutely silent and disdainful, but Kylo reads the moment fear starts to register on his lone eyeball. _Good. Be scared. Your death won’t plague me._

What Unkar will not give willingly, Kylo will forcefully take.

He stares at Unkar’s eye, sending his energy into the other’s mind, looking for what he needs.

_Bitterness, bile, bruising, girl, mid-twenties, anger, violence, apartment, sense of energy, confusion, hazy, girl, London, bruising, secret, screams…_

His prodding is interrupted by that singular, elusive energy signature, grazing his consciousness. Unkar falls out of trance, and his eyeline fixes on something behind Kylo. He turns around to look:

There is a girl not three feet away, frightened, and witnessing the whole ordeal.

The same one that Kylo has just seen from Unkar’s mind.

How she can see anything extraordinary is beyond him. But it takes him a second to unscramble her feelings — extremely terrified and confused and panicked, and a second later, she is running away.

But she doesn’t get very far, because he manifests right in front of her, appearing suddenly in wisps of darkness.

And _that_ is when she screams. 

It’s a good thing Kylo Ren is a god. He immediately touches her mind and sends a string of energy to silence her, her scream cut off as soon as she hits unconsciousness. She drops, and he catches her in his arms without thinking.

.:.

It is only when he has transported them back to his fourth dimension home and laid her unconscious body on his bed, does he realise that perhaps it’s not the best idea to bring a human into the fourth dimension godslands, never mind that she won’t remember it. The last time anyone brought a human here...

Well, the human married a goddess, then died at the hands of his own son later on.

(His family is truly shit at being gods, and _even worse_ at being a family.)

But what else was he supposed to do?

So Kylo Ren grabs a chair, sets it by the girl’s bedside, and waits for her magical knockout to pass, so he can search her mind and erase it afterwards. It would be _deeply inconvenient,_ after all, for her to have memories of seeing him and the cyclops. Humans aren’t equipped to process the otherworldly; they lack the fortitude for the unexplainable.

Kylo recalls the impressions he had glimpsed from Unkar’s mind. 

_Girl. Anger, violence. Apartment._

He looks at the girl, passed out on his bed, his magic tethering her firmly to sleep until it wears off. Her brows are furrowed. 

Her face… something is familiar about it, even though he is certain he’s never met her before in his life. He would not forget a face like _that,_ and yet, her features— _beauty aside_ , for he’s seen physical beauty in all its forms and is hardly ever moved by it anymore— calls to him; he parses through her energy signals, disentangling her aura to read it, but he cannot place her.

How strange. 

Idly, he notes her ratty, coffee-stained old shirt, the faded beige cardigan. The torn and ill-fitting jeans, sneakers patched up too many times. The way her baby hairs have unraveled from her bun, framing her face…

 _Scavenger,_ he reads from her attire. _An inconsequential scrap of a girl. The wrong place at the wrong time._

But that’s not true, is it?

How could she have _possibly_ walked in on him, _a god_ , in his corporeal form? Why didn’t she pass by the shop instead, the way his divinity is warrant to ward of mortals? How could she have _seen_ them, when she is just an ordinary human girl?

Very strange, indeed.

As an attempt to answer his own questions, Kylo thinks back to the few memories he was able to pillage from Unkar’s mind.

_Bitterness, bile. Bruising._

An impression— a line of thought he’d taken from Plutt— gets clearer, as though coming into focus, until he sees it:

A girl, _this girl,_ Rey. Her name is Rey, she lives a floor above Plutt’s shop. He can also read the way Unkar has always seen her: as an inconvenience, as a poor girl from across the Atlantic _,_ another tenant, another one of his many sources of income. _Another victim,_ Kylo observes with a flicker of distaste towards the cyclops...

And as a secret. A dirty secret, meant to never see the light of day, he realizes. 

He pursues the impression to see more of Unkar’s interactions with the girl, focused on clarifying the fuzzy images: Rey, five years ago. Her arrival, her discomfort towards Unkar, the cyclop’s condescension towards her. Kylo watches as though from Unkar’s eyes, and when he sees the man use the word _sweetheart_ , sees him try to reach out inappropriately, to place a hand on Rey as she turns the key in the doorknob of her apartment…

Disgust rattles him so violently that he jolts out of focus, cutting the scene short.

Something inside him takes a vicious turn. He takes a deep breath. Above him, a corner of the ceiling starts to smoulder.

He leaves the room quickly, footsteps brisk and silent, and the smoke stops.

* * *

~.:.~

Rey is in the middle of the desert.

She looks around, looks behind her: the trail of her footsteps trace far off into the distance, even beyond the horizon. She figures that she has been walking for quite some time, why stop now? Onward she goes, and she is looking for her familiar forest, her very own oasis, when she stops short and looks down at her hands, fingers outstretched.

She wriggles them, feeling the spaces between her knuckles. She knows she had _something_ around them, tangled from before, but her hands now feel empty. 

It’s… distressing, but she keeps going.

When she reaches the edge of her forest, she stops to admire the foliage, the way the scent of the earth changes, the way the leaves look terribly greener. _Everything feels more real,_ she thinks as she heads into the woodland.

She sees him from a distance, his back turned to her. Her Shadow, except he is less “shadow” now and more of a solid, hulking figure. She smiles.

“Hey! Hey you!” She shouts at him, happy to see him. He seems startled at her voice, and when he turns around, she waves her arms in greeting over her head, giddy even as she makes her way to him in the crunch of leaves and over fallen logs and slippery moss and the quiet gurgling of a brook nearby, light spilling in beams from the forest canopy.

He is wearing a mask over his head, as he always has, except now it looks solid and real: a black lined with silver and red gold, in the shape of what seems to be an ancient helmet.

“What’s that silly thing on your head?” she laughs, flicking his helmet with her finger even though she has to crane her neck up to do it.

The Shadow doesn’t move. He stands stock-still before her, hands resting tensely at his sides. Rey has never seen him in this much detail; she can see the lining of his sleeves, the span of his shoulders, how tall he is. He is still the same man she’s always known, but...

He is, today, less of a vague shape and more like an actual person. It's a pleasant feeling, to see him rendered in proper shape and form. 

“Well, go on, then. Aren’t you happy to see me?” Rey asks, sensing his hesitation in the air between them. He tilts his head, but doesn’t reply.

“Fine then, I’ll go first,” Rey chirps, sitting on a fallen log, propping a foot up so her arm could rest on her knee, idly plucking the leaves off a fern as she thinks back to her day the way she has a hundred times before. “Did y’know that it was my birthday today? Rose and Finn surprised me, not that I hadn’t—”

“Who are you?”

The baritone of his voice vibrates against the forest floor, against trees and foliage and the scatter of sunlight. Butterflies scamper off. The background din of the woods crystallises in a sharp vacuum as his voice rips across the space, radiating outwards, trickling down her spine in a current of energy.

Rey has had conversations with him, certainly. But never _like this_. Like this place couldn't contain his words spoken aloud; Rey can't recall ever hearing him like this.

But that’s not what bothers her.

“Sorry, what? What do you mean ‘who am I’?” 

The notion of his question makes her feel sick to her stomach.

“Who are you?” he repeats, in that same, deep, commanding voice.

The smile fades from Rey’s face. A strange fear grips her, the forest air feeling clogged and heavy in her lungs. _He doesn’t know me,_ she thinks, and the words sit in her chest like panic. _He doesn’t know me anymore. I thought… but he doesn’t remember me._

Which is a silly thing to be so affected by. He _is_ a figment of her imagination, after all.

“I’m… your friend,” Rey says, barely more than a whisper as she slowly stands up from her perch on the log, her chest tight. _You’re my friend, remember?_ she wants to ask. _You’re someone I trust, and you’re imaginary, but you’re still my friend. Aren’t you?_

_Or did you forget me too? Am I so inconsequential?_

This very painful thought finds her walking backwards, trying to get away but unable to tear her eyes off his form, looming over her, clad in a full, menacing black. Her imaginary friend, now a stranger. 

Suddenly, the sky above them transforms from sunny to dark, and Rey starts to smell incoming rain, and she can feel her dream morphing into something else entirely. She looks at the figure before her, and she can sense him. Clearly, and not at all in the way he’s been murky in the past:

He is darkness. Serious, and burdened, and very, very upset.

And he is slowly stalking towards her.

At once, Rey knows this has become a nightmare. She scrambles to walk backwards into the thick of the darkened forest, against tree trunks and the uneven leafy ground, the rumbling sounds of a thunderstorm looming overhead.

She stumbles and trips, falling backward with a choking gasp. The air that fills her lungs is a sudden drowning.

.:.

Rey wakes up with a shock, bolting upright, her chest heaving.

The air that enters her lungs is sharp, sharper than she’s ever felt: a fullness, a change in the atmosphere, a change in her perception. Like her intuition has suddenly become...

Her eyes dart around the dark room, brain trying to understand the resonance of… how everything _feels different._ Far more alive and breathing, a broader spectrum of colors and sounds and sensations. She reaches for wakefulness, rubbing her eyes and wiggling her toes, but…

_What’s happening?!_

She breathes in deeper, and even with full awareness being a little ways off, she remembers.

_Plutt’s eyeball. The man..._

She looks around: the strange space and distinct lack of mess means she is _not_ in her apartment. Her palms curl against the sheets, and the thread-count softness means she is definitely _not_ in her bed.

_Where am I?!_

Unfamiliarity sets in, and her breathing has turned fast and panicked. Whether it's from her nightmare or from her apparent kidnapping, she doesn’t have time to figure out before the double doors of the room fling open.

* * *

~.:.~

Standing on the balcony to cool off, Kylo resists the urge to hunt down Unkar Plutt right this moment so he could _drain that godsdamned cyclops of his will to live_ , but that would be unwise, given that he has a human girl sleeping in his quarters. Inter-dimensional travel will have to wait.

For now, the most pressing matter is the girl. Who is she? Why is she so hidden within Unkar’s mind? What’s so special about her that he can’t even decipher her energies? 

 _It has to be the Alignment. Yes, that must be it,_ he thinks.

But how in Hades could she have possibly—

He startles, sensing the energy around him suddenly ripple with life. He goes very still.

Not many creatures in the universe can creep up on a god; Titans, some of the Sith, sure. Only the most powerful sorcerers and witches. Other gods, too. But that’s about it. He doesn’t remember inviting _any of those_ in here, his fourth dimension Naboo home, which also happens to be one of his family’s oldest strongholds, and his grandmother’s favorite _impenetrable_ castle.

Nevertheless, someone is behind him.

But before his training could kick in, he hears her: “Hey! Hey you!”

Her voice. Her voice— as clear as day, and just as bright— hits him along with a blooming energy signature that wraps itself around his own, caressing a haunting familiarity inside him.

When he turns around, he sees nothing but the empty balcony and the inside corridors. But he closes his eyes, and _there._ There it is: if he focused hard enough, he could almost fit himself between here and a half-dimension— _the dreamscape,_ he thinks— and he sees her.

Rey. He sees the girl, Rey.

She must be dreaming in the other room, but…

With his eyes closed, he sees her walking towards him, reads the happiness radiating out of her. He can almost hear the background noise, the chattering of the forest. _The forest..._

The unmistakable surroundings of a woodland, a place in _his_ dreams that _she_ shouldn’t be part of. He can just barely sense her, the invisible nature of the dreamscape blurring the imagery, but he can guess the moment that she is standing in front of him, smiling. 

“What’s that silly thing on your head?” she asks, and he isn’t prepared for the way her hand suddenly reaches up to flick at his temple. _Ow..._

He should be irritated, furious even, but he finds himself merely confused (perhaps a touch amused), wary as he is about this. Something doesn’t feel right… or rather, it feels _too right,_ her signature warm and strong and very, very odd...

The way it fits with his.  

 _“_ Well, go on then. Aren’t you happy to see me?”

 _Should I be?_ he wants to ask, because for some distressing reason, he feels like he should _._ Something in him thinks he _must_ know her, or have an inkling at the very least. But he doesn’t.

Does he?

“Fine then, I’ll go first,” she says, as she seems to settle down somewhere near him, and _Why are you talking to me like you know me?_ “Did y’know that it was my birthday today? Rose and Finn surprised me, not that I hadn’t—”

“Who are you?” he interrupts, and something happens as soon as he speaks.

He senses it: her energy signature shifts the moment she hears him. Surprise, hesitation. He feels his own energy responding in turn, reaching out to twine around hers, reading her, grasping her, almost clinging to her the way it clings to him…

Allowing him to sense that she is surprised and deeply upset _._

“Sorry, what? What do you mean ‘who am I’?” she asks, and he doesn’t need to hear her tone to feel her waver. Still, his question remains:

“Who are you?”

Something akin to panic flares in the air around him.

“I’m… your friend,” he hears her say, but it is soft and shaky, and questioning. Almost pained.

A part of him— some hidden, irreclaimable remnant of the Olympic deity that he is, still running in his damned Skywalker blood— sings with longing. The kind he has been cursed with, once upon a time. A sharp ache that reminds him of the vacuum of his existence, a loneliness in the shape of a person, a friend, _a lover,_ he will never meet. Because she doesn’t exist. Not for someone like him.

 _I have no friends,_ he wants to tell her. But he can sense her turning frightened and… incredibly, unbearably sad. 

Which upsets him. For no good reason.

He walks towards her, his own internal disquiet moving his feet forward, but she is slowly backing away from him. Her energy is surging, his dark mood mirroring hers until suddenly, the hazy dreamscape vision disappears. The air stills.

Kylo opens his eyes to silence. 

She’s awake.

Immediately, he stalks back to his room across the corridor and in a few strides he is flinging the large double doors open, finding her startled and breathing heavily on his bed, wide panicked eyes landing on him. 

She tries to jump up to run away, but he reaches a hand and mentally pins her back down; she gasps as her torso hits back against the pillows with the force of his magic. Panic, anger, a screaming kind of sharpness radiating from her, pushing back against his power, and Kylo is surprised at how strong it is. At how strong _she_ is.

No normal human girl could possibly be this strong.

He walks slowly towards her, rounding the bed, maintaining control as his outstretched hand pins her down, the harsh sounds of her breathing the only thing that disturbs the silence of Naboo’s night. Her face is pinched in distress, her eyes not once leaving him, tracking his movements with a glare even as her chest heaves. Her temples are shiny with sweat.

“Who are you?” he asks for the third time now, and as soon as the words leave him, her brows unknit in a flicker of recognition. It is gone just as fast. 

“You’re asking me?! I’m the one you kidnapped!” she snaps angrily, hands curling into fists at her sides, breathing harsh with indignation and fear. “ _Where the hell am I?!_ ”

Conceding that the girl has a point, Kylo slackens his invisible hold on her, giving her a little more space. He sees her take a heaving breath. “It doesn’t matter. You won’t remember any of this anyway,” he tells her, almost like an afterthought, a mere courtesy. “I’ll put you back where you came from. But first, I need information.”

And with that, he looks into her eyes and focuses to enter her mind, his hand reaching out to parse through her memories... but his power is met with a force so strong, it resists him and pushes back violently—

Entering _his_ mind.

He gasps when it hits him: her unreadable energy gripping him senseless, running like a current in his body, under his skin, his heart getting shocked into hammering…

And then it holds him.

A swell of deep emotions curl from the base of his neck into his bones, a tide of loneliness and longing so familiar he could almost mistake it as his own. Then it breathes, not taking but almost _giving_ , lending thoughts and hopes and fears…

Kylo’s eyes widen when he realizes that his very energies are doing the same thing _in her_.

He jerks his hand back immediately, cutting the connection and withdrawing his power completely.

_What in Hades?!_

He stares at her, her eyes wide and unblinking, her breaths still rushing out hard and fast. His own breathing has ramped up as well.

She swallows before speaking. “How— _what was that?_ ” she asks between gasps.

Kylo has no answer to that question.

“Who are you?” she adds, her hand coming up to her chest, no doubt feeling her heart pounding just like his. He opens his mouth to speak but before he has a word out, he is met with a wave of energy that spikes _right out of nowhere,_ and she is suddenly clambering out of the bed, scrambling in a terrified sprint, clutching the doorframe for support as she swings herself out of the room.

Kylo is so shell-shocked that it takes him a moment before he gets the common sense to go after her, all the while cursing the infernal fucking _stars_ for wreaking havoc on schedule. 

_Fucking Alignments._

He sweeps out of his room to go after the girl running around his palace before she accidentally walks into an inter-dimensional portal or, gods forbid, into the fucking _Nethers,_ because it’s just _that_ kind of night, Kylo thinks.

_Fucking Millennium Alignments._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The biggest problem I have with this story is that each chapter goes through my fifteen revision versions because I don't know how to let well enough alone. But comments would be much appreciated!
> 
> Kylo and Unkar's conversation is in [Mando'a.](https://lingojam.com/Mandoa-EnglishTranslator)
> 
> Finally, I would just like to offer a DIVINE CONGRATULATIONS TO THEA (AKA DIASTERISMS) FOR COMPLETING HER FIC "LANDSCAPE WITH A BLUR OF CONQUERORS" <3 I CAN NOW PERMIT MYSELF TO ABSOLUTELY FORFEIT SLEEP ON A WEEKDAY TO BINGE IT.
> 
> Yell @ me on tumblr (reyreyalltheway) and twitter (annesuniverses)! :)


	5. An Understandably Upsetting Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What it says on the tin.

_If you’re gonna escape, now’s the time, kid._

The words flit through her mind, and with a final panicked resolution, Rey takes the opportunity and _runs like hell_ out of the room _,_ adrenaline and something else coursing through her, something electric, buzzing just beneath her skin.

The immediate corridor outside is far too large to have any right being where she finds herself but she runs along the length of it as fast as she can until she finds a door and—

_Not there!_

The thought is a warning plea if she ever heard one, so she skips the first door she finds and turns to her left instead, which happens to be _another_ corridor. 

She’s not super sure where she’s going, and is even less sure of where she is exactly with nothing but the moonlit sky and overlarge windows to illuminate her surroundings, which, by the way, _where am I and why does everything look foreign and expensive?!_  

She could almost glint the opulence in the dark, the paintings on the wall, the sleek this-is-way-above-my-paygrade large interiors distantly registering in her rush to get out of there. The very air she is panting feels like it could cost at least a week’s earnings per breath.

 _Shit, if I’m not in Coruscant anymore..._ The thought of being anywhere but the East Coast area is sending her mental.

And as to the nature of her tall, intimidating kidnapper, well.

(As to the way she felt something invisible reaching into her heart, wrapping itself around her breathing, crawling into her bloodstream, cutting goosebumps up the skin of her spine… _well._ )

If he appears in front of her— Rey thinks as she passes by pillar after pillar, it’s a very long corridor— _which he very well could,_ as inconvenient as that may be, Rey isn’t going down without a fight.

Just as Rey spots what looks to be a staircase to the far left, she feels him: the presence of her kidnapperstriding towards her, vibrating with power. The air almost shakes with his approach, his footsteps closing in, even as her legs carry her as fast as they can. _He’ll find me, he’ll catch me._ She can feel him, his energy unreadable, ghost-like, and dangerous. 

Desperation unfurls inside her.

 _Calm down, kid. He ain’t that bad._ The thought comes out of nowhere.

And yet, fear seizes her. A panic borne from years of running with the weight of her survival hanging in the balance. So with one look at nearest window beside her, she scrambles towards it and, finding no latch or opening, she takes the first thing she sees— what looks to be a large, decorative plate displayed on the wall nearby— and hauls it at the window, her only thought being _Out, need to get out of here, must get away, can’t stay here…_

Glass flies everywhere. 

Rey, uncaring of it, hauls herself up and out, onto a very narrow ledge, her cornered mind screaming her next movements, fingers gripping the jagged breakage; tactile survival instincts left over from when she had once been a child, flaring to life as she wields it clumsily again after so long. 

Outside is silver moonlight and a cold draft that Rey feels as she leans back and carefully walks herself sideways along the ledge. She makes her way to the corner of her window, unable to move any further, as the ledge does not wrap around the length of the property.

She realizes that she is stuck perhaps a moment too late, when she looks down. 

Stuck between getting caught by her intimidating captor, and falling to her death some fifty feet below, where there are _waves_ beating against the side of the cliff-wall, violent and loud and very cold, if the evening temperature is anything to go by. And dark, almost too dark, and menacing, and _alive…_

The night swallows up everything in its wake; the meagre skylight bathes everything in a faint blue. She hadn’t realised there was a sea. But below her is most definitely a sea, foaming at the edge of the tide. And beneath it, something else.

And then she can sense him behind her, inside the corridor. 

“You broke my window,” he says, tone unreadable.

 _At least he doesn’t sound so upset,_ she wryly thinks in the midst of paralysing fear. Her fingers slip as they try to find purchase on the rough-hewn stone pillar beside her, and her shaky legs frighten her balance. Which makes her tremble even more.

She isn’t herself. 

Her eyes shut. She tries to force her manic breathing to calm, to no avail. She remains a shivering, panicked mess of _not wanting to die,_ her mind foggy with a darkness she has never felt before. The energy around her hums in her fear. Her mouth opens, she gives voice to her desperation, whispered prayers she barely registers as they are swept away by the wind and the howling sea.

The man behind her doesn’t seem to hear. But something does.

A seeping chill makes its way upwards, from her Converse-clad feet, to her legs, through the holes in her jeans and up, making her shiver from both terror and temperature, until it finally reaches her mouth where her breaths start to come out in fogs.

 _“Nu girdim j'us,”_ Rey hears the words coming from below her. 

She chances to look down, and there, in the violence of the waves, in the darkness of the water, are two glowing yellow stones. Until they get bigger, turn into slits, and Rey realizes— with a kind of frozen disbelief that renders her mind unable to process anything else— that _Those aren’t stones._

The eyes blink at her from beneath the craggy, wave-tossed darkness. Sinister and predatory, and _very large,_ red-yellow irises disembodied in the black of the violent water. The face of it, visible from quite a long way down, disfigured and gigantic.

Rey gasps. Not at the grotesquely large eyes and the hints of a large mouth, but at the magnitude of the idea that there are such things as monsters. And that she is unfortunate enough to find herself at the mercy of one, right now. 

 _“Zhol valia buti prie veek. Kad nu galetis byloti nuo tave xela,”_ it hisses. 

Everything she knows about reality dissolves in a haze of absolute shock.

_Don’t move, kid._

“Rey. Don’t move.” She hears the voice her kidnapper and vaguely registers that he is still behind her, in the corridor. She would sense that he is determined to get her back inside in one piece, but Rey is too busy trying to get a grip to notice.

* * *

~.:.~

It doesn’t take much for Kylo to sense her panic as she makes for the corridors. He tries manifesting in front of her, and while _that_ would be on-brand as the kind of melodramatic power move that the men in his lineage would approve of, unfortunately, something is getting in the way. 

Either something is blocking his power, or the stars have finally lost itand have completely upheaved the laws of the universe.

Nevertheless, his strides are purposeful and brisk. _She is fast,_ he thinks. Strangely, incredibly fast, so he keeps track of her energy signature where she goes. It remains to him the biggest puzzle, how a girl like her could have the most elusive, powerful, unreadable of energies, but that’s a puzzle for another time.

He senses her go into his grandparents’ heritage hallway.

 _What a pesky scavenger,_ he thinks to himself, chasing after her, marginally annoyed at the beautiful girl running around his house, when he hears it—

Glass shattering.

 _Shit._ His almost picks up the pace, almost, sensing the spike in her desperation as he catches up.

When he reaches her, his fears are confirmed as he notes the broken window, his grandparents’ broken ceremonial plate— the _marriage plate_ , of all things— and how the girl is standing on the thin ledge outside, her back to him, vibrating with panic, with fear… a reckless determination stemming from a much deeper source.

_I’ve got a bad feeling about this._

The thought flits through him as he considers her nervous energy broadcasting itself in this fourth-dimension atmosphere, practically a beacon calling for black magic. 

(Her legs are shaky as she manoeuvres herself sideways, and the draft is strong from the sea; his first instinct is to pull her back inside, all his senses honed in on her physicality, her breathing, her heartbeat, his reflexes ready to hold her aloft at a moment’s notice should any accidents happen...)

“You broke my window,” he tells her instead, keeping edge off his tone as his fingers twitch at his side.

But her panic continues to effuse the air, and he wracks his brain for a way to calm her down before she attracts the unwanted attention of…

 _Too late_ , he thinks, when he senses the chilly approach, below them both: a behemoth of a creature, moving in with speed.

_Fuck._

Naboo waters are inherently inter-dimensional, connecting to many waterways across worlds. It also happens to be linked to the Nethers. Which means that, on days when the fabric of the universe is practically porous and paper-thin, on days like _the first day of the fucking Millennium Alignment,_ Kylo muses, certain creatures can, theoretically, make their way across dimensions.

Which is exactly what Kylo senses some storeys beneath him: the energies ancient and dark, the chill wafting in from the broken window. He knows what’s coming, can sense its approach and size and demeanour, and doesn’t like it one bit.

“Please. I don’t want to die, please— please don’t hurt me.”

He almost doesn’t hear Rey’s words, but he untangles the thought from her energy.

He frowns; her fear is thick, and a creature— a sea siren, because _that’s just his luck—_ has come, and is trying to pull at Rey’s energy and feed on it. Which shouldn’t be possible. And yet...

 _Gods damn._ He passes an aggravated hand over his face, debating whether this girl is worth the ramifications of angering a Sith creature.

 _“(I heard you),”_ he hears the sea siren whisper in the dark language. _“(It will be over soon. But I cannot speak for the pain.)”_

His eyes land on the shivering mess of a girl, standing at the corner of his ledge outside, crumpling from the darkness. 

Something snaps inside him. Not a breaking, but like a slotting into place. Of a dormant instinct, something long forgotten.

He steps up on the window, ducks out onto the ledge, beside the girl wrestling to keep control, the thick of the siren’s dark energy tugging at her. The narrow ledge barely fits his feet, but he holds himself up with his divinity; an invisible power that he sends over in large waves, towards the creature. He isn’t fuelled by anger, not exactly. More like a quiet determination to let this creature know what is and isn’t acceptable, in _his_ territory. Sith be damned.

“Nenx stai, irankir,” he tells it, touching his words with black magic, to turn it away. “M'tye kash manosi. Tu aras nenx zhelosa stai. Eile salini dabar.”

 _Or you’ll deal with me,_ goes unspoken but clear in the power he sends cascading down the cliff.

The sea siren’s eyes glow more brightly, and then, with recognition of who Kylo is, the chill withdraws from the air. “ _Ἔρως_ ,” it says, his ancient name an echoed whisper as the eyes disappear into the dark, its long and spindly body snaking away in resigned fury, its scarred, leathery tail breaking waves against the cliff face when it swims off.

As the dark energies evaporate from the aura around them, Kylo turns towards the girl on his right, and finds her shaking her head clear of the previous moment’s terrors.

 _How odd,_ he thinks, not for the first time that night. _You should be dead by now._

(He ignores his strange relief at this, at her not being dead.)

She looks down at his feet. It startles her to see him levitating, and she nearly slips but for Kylo’s magic securing her against the pillar. She gasps.

“That’s what you get for damaging my property,” he tells her, pocketing his hands.

She looks up at him, large and wary eyes matching her unsteady breathing.

“Are you going to kill me?” she breathes out.

Kylo almost frowns. “No.” 

“You going to hurt me, then?” is her next question, spoken more softly in an attempt to hide the tremor in her voice. Which would match the tremor in her hands, bloody where they were gashed by her attempt at a break-out, still seeking purchase on the wall and glass behind her. 

 _I would never,_ he thinks of saying, but that would imply that she will never be hurt by his doing, and that is a tricky thing to say. Kylo is many things, but he is not a liar.

“No,” he says instead. “But when I’m off this ledge, a cold death will be an accident away,” he says, pointedly looking over his shoulder into the dark abyss of the cliffside and the crashing of waters below. 

He takes one long look at her— _I hope you’re worth this,_ he thinks absently— then tucks himself through the broken window and promptly steps back inside the corridor. “Come inside before you slip. Please.”

With the training of old graces unused for centuries, he extends a hand to her. He waits, hand hanging however awkwardly mid-air, as she carefully considers her options, standing on a very narrow ledge, looking behind her and below her. The air between them shifts when he reads her scared but willing to do as he suggested. She gingerly reenters the corridor through the pitiful breakage of the window, wincing as she discovers the way her hands have been wounded from the first attempt. She doesn’t take his hand when she hops onto the ground, shoes crunching on debris; he doesn’t take offense.

They stand before one another face to face, sizing each other up.

Her unruly hair has been whipped to disarray, her cardigan fallen down one shoulder. Her breathing isn’t calm yet, but stabilising. He notes her heart rate _,_ her adrenaline, the mild tremors, the gashed and bleeding palms as he does a physical check over the girl who just survived a sea siren’s darkness.

 _Scavenger,_ he thinks, tracing her features with his eyes, ignoring the pull of familiarity, the curious urge to…

 _What? To do what, exactly?_ He asks himself, because surely, her existence is mysterious enough.

She needs to tilt her head up to look at him, her eyelashes casting shadows in the moonlight.

From his father, Kylo had learned two things: how to understand the prey, and how to hunt it. The former required a certain patience, a finesse that knows exactly how a creature's heart beats, and how to find the spaces between. But this unreadable human girl with a strange aura does not seem to fit the bill as anything he's ever encountered before. If understanding is what he needs, she isn't giving him anything. 

The air around them charges with tension and fear and fascination.

Perhaps she is nothing more than a frightened girl. _Wrong place, wrong time,_ he thinks. Nothing more to it than that. 

So what is this tangle of energies between them?

He sees her swallow, the movement on her throat short and nervous when she asks “Where am I? Where is this?”

“My house,” he says, and asks a question in turn: “Who are you?”

“You… called me 'Rey'. You already know my name. How’d you know my name?” she asks right back, scrunching her nose.

It has freckles.

Kylo is suddenly disturbed beyond comprehension, connecting two distinctly unrelated things in his mind, and the air between them sings with his sudden unease. Rey responds with an uptick of nervousness. She takes a step back.

“Who are you, really?” Kylo asks, a little more forcefully this time, this connection giving rise to a discomfort that he doesn’t know how to deal with. “Who sent you?”

“I’m nobody, I’m— I’m just a girl,” Rey responds, putting on a brave face. “Whom you kidnapped… last night…”

He sees it on her expression, the moment it all returns to her as she recalls the events of late.

“You took me,” she says, brows knitting as she considers the fact, only just now remembering again. “You took me.”

“With the intention of putting you back,” he replies. It comes out flat.

“You’re a kidnapper,” she repeats, taking bigger steps, backing away from him to the wall of the broken window, and he can sense the way her cornered mind flares with panic, the way her energies start to ripple, “You’re— are you going to sell me? Is this— Is that what this is? Are you going to—” Power, _waves of it_ , emanates from the girl in front of him, who thinks she’s going to be… what? Sold to the highest bidder?

The very thought upsets him more than he’d like to dwell on. 

But before he is able to make the snap judgement to put her to sleep again, his eyes land to their feet:

Glass. Shards of it, broken from the window and the plate, gingerly lifting off the marble floor. 

They float upwards, suspended on her energy tides, glinting in the moonlight. He looks back up at her: she is trembling, the weightless glass and debris surrounding her, her breaths coming out harsh and fast, her eyes glassy with panic, blood warping up her hands, energy pulsing with magic he has never before seen.

Except when he’s felt that same raw power in himself.

With the practiced air of one who has dealt with many unstable forces in his lifetime, Kylo Ren lifts a hand up, and sends her a wave of energy of his own.

She inhales. The floating debris fall back down, right before she slumps into unconsciousness for the second time in the last few hours. He strides in to catch her before her body hits the floor, her limp weight an awkward tangle in his arms, before he hefts her properly into a carry, lifting her from the back of her knees and shoulders.

He is surprised by her lightness, even if he hadn’t noticed the first time around. But he notices it now; she is light, and warm, and utterly depleted, burnt out by the power that has drained from her body, leaving nothing but an empty shell in its wake. His eyes track to her bloodstained fingers.

His arms tighten around her gently.

This girl... _Rey,_ he thinks of her name, of the way the single syllable stands alone. The way he had read how valuable she is in Unkar’s mind, how the cyclops had been secretive of her existence. How Unkar had kept her— this powerful, strange girl— right under the Olympians’ noses in Coruscant. He thinks of her fear and recklessness. And the severe, almost necessary strength. 

There are instincts buried in the graveyards of his past life. There are things that he used to be, that he isn’t anymore. Things that had been purged out of his very being.

Those things, they should be _dead_. 

(Not alive and well, resuscitated from centuries of sleep just because a girl finds herself thrust into a world she doesn't belong in.)

He resolves, then and there, to parse through her mind and erase her memories on another day, when it isn’t the first day of the universe’s scheduled downtime. He’ll put her back in the third dimension, for the meantime. He has a cyclops to track down.

* * *

~.:.~

Rey opens her eyes.

For a brief moment, her mind places her in a large bedroom not her own, but she finds she is back in her studio apartment. She sits up, looks around, sees the light of early morning filtering in from her window. Her purse sits on her kitchen table. She moves to look for her mobile to check the time, when she sees her hands:

They are wrapped in cloth.

Shaking, she unwraps them gently, afraid of what she’ll see underneath, the action itself coaxing out memories— from another dream, another lifetime ago— and she sees the stain of dried blood, rust red on parts of the linen near her skin…

But her hands are smooth and woundless when she unwraps them.

_What happened to me?_

She presses a hand to her mouth. Wave after wave of unbearable confusion drowns her, the memories pressing up behind her lids— Plutt, the unfamiliar palace, the dream-turned-nightmare, the ledge, the broken window, the paralysing panic, _the man—_ and then she’s sobbing soundlessly.

_What is happening to me?!_

Because with every intake of breath, every hiccup, the air is as vibrant and different as she had felt it last night, when she’d woken up in a bedroom not her own. Vibrant in the way she has always intuited, but never understood. Vibrant in a way that amplifies her experience of _existing._

And it scares the everliving _fuck_ out of her.

* * *

_And I know it's true_   
_that visions are seldom all they seem..._   
_But if I know you, I know what you'll do:_   
_You'll love me at once_   
_the way you did once upon a dream._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're familiar with the Eros x Psyche story, holler! <3
> 
> This update has been brought to you by the fact that MY TRASH SON HAS DONE NOTHING WRONG IN HIS LIFE. Tros marketing really went there.
> 
> Notes:
> 
> \- The language that Kylo and the sea siren use is the [Sith language.](https://lingojam.com/Sith)
> 
> \- Kylo's palace is patterned after TPM's Naboo.
> 
> \- Finally, a note on characterisation: 
> 
> I try to stay true to character but the main difference between my story's Reylo and Canon's Reylo is that Canon is in the midst of a war; Kylo's volatile, child-like behaviour is exaggerated by the high stakes. In this story, he's several centuries old and he's Seen Some Shit™. Hence, he's a little more mellow and jaded.
> 
> And Rey is, well. Rey is Rey. We'll get to that in a bit. ;)
> 
> Comments are much appreciated! And thank you for reading! Find me on Twitter & Tumblr (@ reyreyalltheway)!


	6. A String of Awakenings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of strange things, there are stranger things yet to come.

Oral tradition and a few hellenistic texts tell of Tartarus like this: as a dungeon, as a hell for the ancients and something worse for everyone else. A place of imprisonment for the strongest of beings, in the deepest abyss of the earth.

It is a great and grave secret, therefore, that Tartarus is not necessarily “hell” as much as it is a terrible hassle to get to.

 The Knights of Ren can attest to that.

“And where’ve _you_ been?”

The tall man who has just swept into the hexagonal antechamber heads straight for his place on the round table, sitting amongst the company of his fellow Knights. His brows are drawn, an almost-scowl in place of his usual calm. He shifts a shoulder as though shrugging off an invisible nuisance before he answers:

“Sorry I’m late. There was traffic at the Nethers.”

The joke falls flat as intended while the atmosphere crips around him, bending to his strong aura, thickened as it is by the surrounding Sith ruins in this realm. He manifests a darkblade from thin air, tossing it about. From his blank stare to the way he fidgets with the dagger, back and forth and back again like a pendulum, he reeks of freshly-resolved trouble with a hint of loose ends.

“You’re never late, Galen. What happened?”

Galen Marek continues to tip his blade every which way, his pensive expression hiding a tension one could only glimpse in his energy signature. 

He twitches his shoulder again, his restlessness seeping into the air.

“I had to do some damage control with the Nightsisters.” He leans lopsidedly on his high-back oak chair. “Ambrosia to who can guess why.”

“Tell me it wasn’t Asajj,” one of the other Knights half-asks, and Galen meets her blue eyes with a short shake of the head. Not a no _,_ but more a _This is not the time or place,_ or _It doesn’t matter._ Juno clenches her jaw.

Another Knight, a woman composed of flinty eyes and sharp edges, speaks up: “What Lord Ren does at his territory is none of our business,” said Sabine.

Galen, being Galen, begs to differ as the only form of begging he knows:

“It _becomes_ our business when I get sabotaged by a Sith clan in the middle of a mission and interrogated by _Maul himself_ about why in gods’ name Master Ren disrespected one of their sea sirens with black magic. Where is he, anyway?” His words are harsh, but his tone isn’t taken as defiance. That word and all its synonyms don’t exist in Galen’s dictionary.

“He’s out,” comes from the man to Marek’s left: cobalt eyes and copper skin, and an aura that rippled with youth-like conviction. Ezra turns to address Galen, voice pitched low:  “He’s working on assignment from the Supreme Leader, trailing a cyclops to the Highlands.”

“Highlands? Like, in Europe? He’s in the _fucking Third—?!”_

Sabine throws him a look like daggers. He closes his eyes, sifts through the dark influences that are invading his moods in this realm.

The Alignment is a fragile thing that needs all hands on deck. Hearing that their Master is sent off on Snoke’s errant goose-chase while they’re left to deal with disreputable allies pissed off by the Titans’ penchant for deceit, Galen is left a little on edge. 

 _Gods, I hate it here,_ he thinks.

But he shushes under Sabine’s silent rebuke anyway, turns towards the table instead. Thinking. “Sorry,” he says, shaking off the irritability that has clouded his mind since he entered Tartarus. He deftly flicks the darkblade so that it disappears into thin air from whence it came. “But if anyone’s got news about why Master Ren could be so, and I quote, ‘off his game’ recently, me and my half-burnt shoulder would appreciate the update.”

“They burnt your shoulder?” 

Juno’s mood turns from irritated into seething, with a touch of concern. A very, very light touch. Almost like an accidental grazing of concern, Galen would have missed it if he had blinked wrong.

“That’s a bit drastic, even for them,” said Ezra.

Galen cracks his neck, leans his forearms on the table. Hides a wince behind a study of the oak table’s surface. “They were sending a message. The Sith want a word with him.”

* * *

~.:.~

“Earth to Rey? Hello? Are you okay?”

Rey gasps when she nearly bumps into Rose, who has placed herself firmly within an _over-my-dead-body_ radius. With her left hand on her hip, her stare fixed the few inches up on Rey’s taller form, Rey knows there’s no avoiding the topic now.

But her brain does a quick imaginative rendition of Rose with only one eyeball and Rey can’t help but blank out.

“Hey, hey, hey! What’s going on?” Rose grips her shoulders as she looks her dead in the eyes, “You’ve been like this all morning, it’s not like you. Talk to me. What’s happening in there?”

Rey’s mouth hangs limply while her brain runs a mile a minute:

Yesterday, she was just another twenty-something trying to make ends meet in this tiny East Coast town. This morning, she woke up and she knew at least one of four things were true:

One, her landlord developed a lone gargantuan eyeball in the middle of his forehead while having a spat with a man who teleported before her eyes last night;

Two, said man kidnapped her to what looked like bloody Europe or some shit, and she had woken up in an impossible palace with crazy interiors and very long corridors;

Three, she panicked and nearly threw herself out the windows of said palace, which stood by a sea with some pretty questionable marine life, with the rest of the evening being so ridiculously absurd, she’s pushed it to the very back of her mind;

Four…

 _Something inside me has alway been there, but now it’s awake,_ Rey thinks. _And I’m…_

“I’m afraid.” It isn’t much more than a whisper that Rey isn’t sure the other woman hears. But Rose’s expression morphs from distress to solemn worry. In a snap, she is gently but firmly dragging Rey into the backroom by the bicep:

“Rose, there are customers—”

“They can make their own damn coffee.”

The door is shut and Rose stands before Rey with a pinched but patient expression. “What do you mean ‘afraid’?” Rose is to the point, words emphatic and demanding to be answered as clearly and completely as possible.

Rey looks down at her hands.

“Something… something happened last night…” But the words strike a different chord, Rey realizes, and she looks up to see Rose’s eyes widened in horror. “No, sorry, not like that, not—” Rey amends, but still hasn’t found the right words. She sighs. “I think I’m seeing things… I don’t know! I don’t know, exactly, but—”

“Is it Plutt?! Rey, is that glob of shit harassing you again, I swear to god—”

“No, no, well… Yes it is, but—”

How does one tell one’s best friend the staggering series of events culminating in this morning, when Rey woke up realizing the difference between her past twenty five years, and today? How does she explain the way it had felt like she had never truly been alive, until she’d seen her hands unwrapped from bloodstained bandages?

 _Or maybe I’ve completely lost it,_ Rey thinks, and at least _that_ would be a more sensible, 21st century explanation.

The chimes of the cafe door ring someone in, and Rey sighs. She spares Rose a look _(This can wait, there’s a customer!)_ as she makes to head for the counter _._ Rose gives her a glare of her own ( _We’re not done here!_ ) as Rey goes outside to plaster her best service-industry smile.

The man who has just walked up to the pastry display is scruffy, tanned, wavy-haired. He seemed like the kind of man who would be in the business of fighting cartels and running non-profits; when he looks at her, his eyes crinkle. It’s a smile that, Rey observes, is bright and charming and not presidential, not exactly _._ But she’d totally vote for whoever he would endorse for public office. 

 _You’re a hero,_ Rey suddenly thinks. Of the man’s electric presence, like he were a tuning fork for bravery while he stood there deliberating his choice of pastry. Even if his rolled-up sleeves, tucked-out shirt, and stubbled face said more like “ _I’m in between jobs_ ”. 

_Weird._

“Do you have anything with carrots?” He asks after a beat, looking very serious. The man is quite handsome, quite charming, and so very _not_ Rey’s type that she feels mildly relieved. Otherwise she’d be a blundering idiot.

“Sadly, no. Only pumpkin cupcakes,” Rey says. 

“Oh. Too bad. Is Rose around?”

Rey is just about to respond when the woman in question exclaims from behind her: “Poe! You made it!” And Rose is exiting the safety of the counter to greet the man with a hug. And then, to Rey’s horror, Rose’s gleaming, scheming smile looks between the two of them and _Oh, no._

“So, this is Rey! The girl I was telling you about. Rey, this is Poe Dameron. He works at _The Daily Resistance_ with Finn.”

“Ah! Yes, the, er—” Rey’s single brain cell is shaking _._

“War correspondent,” the man supplies helpfully, extending his hand, which Rey shakes. She is _so_ going to kill Rose. “Hi. I’m Poe,” he says.

But Rey thinks she hears another name: _Ἡρακλῆς._ Which is stupid, because that sounds _nothing_ like “Poe”.

“Oh! Hi, yes, the war correspondent. Like Holdo... Finn’s told me all about you,” Rey lies through her teeth.

“Has he?” 

“Wouldn’t shut up about you,” said Rey, her smile feeling like dried plaster across her mouth. She glares at Rose, who, for the most part, looks absolutely delighted at this whole disaster. 

“Well, looks like my job here is done,” Rose says cheerfully as she hands Poe a to-go cup, freshly made, waiting for him. The _gall._ “On the house!” Rose says.

“Oh, wow, thank you! Rose, Rey. So, I’ll see you seven-thirty?”

It takes Rey too long to realize that this last statement was directed at her. And _then_ it hits her, that this is the guy Rose had promised to set her up with, _on a date,_ and _damnit, Rose._

“Yup! See you!” Rey manages to say as Poe winks at her and heads out, swaggering out of the cafe in a brisk walk.

“You’re fired,” Rey tells Rose in a barely-audible hiss as they both watch him leave the premises.

“No I’m not,” Rose responds though her smile as she waves goodbye to Poe. “Besides, you could use the break. Finn and I will man the cafe.”

“He’s not even my type!” Rey watches Poe walk away and turn into a smaller dot on the sidewalk of Qui-Gon Street.

“Your ‘type’ is a non-existent broody goth who wears black long-sleeves in a _forest,_ Rey. I don’t trust your definition of a ‘dream guy’.”

A defensiveness nearly bubbles to the surface, but Rey holds her tongue. _Touché._

After all, how does one say, _My type isn’t just a “dream guy” but also a “nightmare guy”, and possibly a real-life teleporting kidnapper with a really deep voice and whose talents not only include being menacingly huge and having forest-transforming vocal acoustics, but also extends to communicating with sea monsters and levitating on ledges while confusing me, his kidnapped victim, with early-onset Stockholm Syndrome._

Touché, indeed.

* * *

~.:.~

The curse of his dreams go like this:

Every night, she tastes the same: the faint traces of her on his tongue— salt and sun and sweat— the hollows of her skin seared somehow into his mouth, the phantom shape of her neck traced perfectly in his mind, as is the dip of her waist, the weight of her thighs in his palms. If he tries to inhale her, and he always does, it will rip down his body like unbearable longing. Like lightning down his throat, his spine, the lining of his lungs. Desire turns to acid in his bloodstream, and every square inch of her in his arms will feel like burning. But he will hold on for as long as he can, no matter how excruciating. 

Every night, she speaks: he will be in a woodland, where he will wait and wait until she arrives, breathless and happy or sad and sunken, in whatever imagined state she would be in. He will never hear her voice, but he will try to understand, try to respond, try to make conversation, only half of his comprehension intact, with the only thing in the whole universe who doesn’t hate him. 

Every night, she is familiar: not the image of her smile, but the feel of it. Not a visual of her features, but the stealing of his breath in what it must feel like to see such beauty. She will feel like his own heart exists outside of his chest.

And every night, she is torture: his home, beloved and sacred, burning down before his very eyes when he wakes up into heart-numbing reality. It’s a miracle owed to his divine nature that the curse hasn’t driven him to madness. Not yet, at least.

But what _could_ drive him to madness is the uncanny appearance of a human woman that is the spitting metaphysical likeness of his non-existent soulmate.

He knows that Alignments tend to create unfortunate glitches in the fabric of reality, but _this_? 

Bit much.

Which is why he is determined to, first of all, get to the bottom of this. If he can’t extract any sensible explanation from the girl, he’ll track the next best source.

He manifests in the Scottish Highlands, ripping his way across time-space as he appears on the moors, sensing no life for miles around. Here is where the trail of cyclops energy ends: Unkar had been careless in his hasty escape, and Kylo now finds himself tracking his target almost to a point. A little south-west of Inverness, a little ways from the banks of Loch Ness.

The hunt always did come more easily to him than the kill.

_Learned that from your old man, didn’t you?_

He ignores the thought.

The Summer Solstice is merely a dreary film of sunlight stretched thinly over this part of the world; a green-grey tinge on what otherwise would have been black-blue. The wind howls its cycles on the rolling hills, as the hour is late and twilight nears. _Caecus,_ Kylo thinks, of the sweeping invisible hand that caresses everything in its wake in this half-darkness. Or is it _Notus_ that beats against his coat and dishevels his hair and leeches the life out of him here? 

_Everything decays. Even the gods decay. Life is the prolonged act of dying,_ he remembers Snoke telling him once. He had agreed, even when he hadn’t wanted to.

Kylo makes a sharp left turn as he approaches the lakeside ruins of Urquhart Castle, heading to what looks to be a crude cottage shed, sitting slightly askew off the property premises. This outbuilding is, as he senses it, like an energy blindspot. 

Obviously black magic at work. Which is as good a place as any to start.

The night falls quickly as Kylo Ren forces the wooden door open to find it not empty, as its outside appearance might suggest. The glow of the lamplight, amplified by black magic, is only marginally a surprise; this shed, with its rough-hewn log walls and rickety make was already dubious to begin with.

What does come as a surprise, however, is Unkar Plutt’s mutilated body, lying stone-cold dead on a table on one side of the room.

The gruesome lacerations told Kylo three things. One is of the violence’s intention, and two is that the aggressor savoured the precision. The limp-jawed, wide-eyed corpse, illuminated by the murky lamplight above it, is also drained of blood. 

Three: he’d know the marks of this kill anywhere.

Kylo would be glad he found who he was looking for, but not like this. And not with _him:_

“I had wondered what time you’d be getting here.”

The words are dark and layered as Armitage Hux— sorcerer, sycophant, and all around savage-on-call for the First Order— speaks with his trademark superiority complex, his back turned to Kylo. Liquid drips from the table on the other side of the small room, the shadows almost curving to shroud where Hux is working with Unkar’s blood. Other than the blood that stained his long black coat at the edges, he remains as tailored as ever; a sharp contrast to the brutal act he’s just committed.

That Hux had resorted to a blood sacrifice leads to only one likelihood. Kylo has half a thought to kill the sorcerer right now.

His dismissal of the urge is hard-won.

“Didn’t expect you to trail him this early,” Hux says, plucking his bloodstained gloves off of his fingers. He wipes his wrists clean with a washcloth that materializes from the air, then shoves his left arm to peak at the watch beneath his sleeve. “Someone’s _eager._ Though, I suppose it’s just right given your parentage—” 

“What did you do?”

“Nothing too fancy. A few divination rituals,” he says, turning his back to Kylo again as he clears the table, tucking herbs and implements into thin air, until only blood remains on the wooden table before him. “Though I must say, your methods would have been far worse if you’d seen what I saw.”  

When Hux turns back to him, his eyes are a complete and vacant black, caught between this realm and another as he draws on powers he has no natural right to possess. 

“What did you see?” Kylo almost growls the words out, but he keeps his tone even and low.

Hux smirks as he leans back on the table. “Don’t you mean ‘who’? No one you didn’t already see, surely.”

It’s in that moment that Kylo Ren sends a covert sliver of his power into the sorcerer’s mind, and sees a split-second glimpse of a girl in a coffee shop in Coruscant, with Hux none the wiser of this intrusion. It confirms his suspicion.

Kylo feels his blood run cold in his veins. 

Without another word, he disappears, manifesting himself out of the shed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this is difficult to write. Thanks for staying with me here, I promise that the Reylo-heavy plot is starting to weave together. We're as of yet in act 1. ;) 
> 
> ~Notes~
> 
> \- [Galen Marek](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galen_Marek)
> 
> \- [Juno Eclipse](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Juno_Eclipse)
> 
> \- [Ezra Bridger](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ezra_Bridger)
> 
> \- [Sabine Wren](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sabine_Wren)
> 
> \- Darkblade (inspired by the [Darksaber](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Darksaber))
> 
> \- [Asajj Ventress](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Asajj_Ventress)
> 
> \- [Nightsisters](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nightsisters)
> 
> \- [Maul](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Maul) (who remains MY FAVOURITE VILLAIN EVER, and "the patron saint of determination and not dying in a pit", as one tweet puts it. :)) We'll see more of him soon...) 
> 
> \- Caceus and Notus: two of the Greek winds [Greek Mythlogy]
> 
> \- [Urquhart Castle, Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urquhart_Castle)
> 
>  
> 
> Whew! I can't wait for ya'll to read the next chapters, it'll be... very interesting. :) Comments and feedback much appreciated!


	7. First Dates & Second Kidnappings

_Canto Bight_ is the name of a swanky Italian bistro situated in one of Coruscant’s finer districts, flanked by similar establishments right at the edge of downtown, along Cantonica Avenue. Rey has never been, if only because she never understood the existential wrongness of paying one week’s worth of rent for an appetiser, when she could just as easily survive three days, maybe four, on a loaf of white bread and a healthy imagination for the low, low price of less than a dollar.

Not that she would ever vocalize any of this to her date.

Poe picks her up from the cafe, his orange two-door coupe looking starkly out of place idling on the curb of Qui-Gon Street. He had arrived five minutes early, to her utter panic, as she scrambled to change out of her coffee-smelling boyfriend jeans and shirt and apron. 

Rey has exactly one dress to her name: a regency costume dress that Rose’s sister Paige had lent her for a Halloween party. It is three years old, a size too small, and is likely breeding a colony of organisms in a box at the bottom of her closet. 

Which is to say, she is not wearing a dress tonight. 

No matter how much she wished she could look pretty. Not that she wants to impress Poe, but it would be nice, for once, to feel like she deserved any amount of attention that a guy like Poe would be bestowing on her for the evening. So Rey had quickly run for a change of date-appropriate clothes. 

(“He’s pretty great, isn’t he?” After that ambush of an introduction, Rose had told Rey a fine account of how Poe Dameron would fit so well into Rey’s future, and isn’t he handsome, and wait ‘til you see his electric car. A man so approved by her best friend that Rey jokes why doesn’t Rose date him herself. “Oh, I wish. But Finn would be so mad; he already called dibs.”)

Rey puts on her best pair of skinny jeans, her favorite boots (a gift from Finn), and a tight, low-cut black blouse she got from a thrift store for $3.99, two years ago, saving it up for God knows what. The three-quarter sleeves showed off her shoulders well enough, at least it hadn’t shrunk from disuse.

She sighs into the small mirror of the cafe’s restroom, tucks her hair up into the neatest bun she can, which isn’t very neat at all. She’d put on mascara, but the one tube she owned had dried up last holiday season, and she hadn’t had enough reasons to buy a new one.

There are very few things she could save, and even fewer occasions to save up for. 

And boy, if that wasn’t a metaphor for her life.

 _This will have to do,_ she thinks. She has long learned to use self-reassurance, in the absence of choice.

Rose flicks her butt with a dishtowel when Rey heads out. Rey rolls her eyes.

Poe is leaning on the hood of his car. When he sees her, his head tilts. Not leeringly, just appreciatively. Rey thinks she could like him, if only a little bit.

“You look lovely,” he says. Rey is glad she senses no flirty subtext, which is indication enough of her hopes for the evening. He opens the door for her.

“Thanks,” she says, and opens her mouth to return the compliment. But her palms touch the leather of his car seat and she stops. Goosebumps echo up the inside of her arms.

The car is alive.

She can feel it, its engine purring. _This is not a car_ , she thinks, and finds herself disoriented by the truth of it. Of the fact that this car is alive. It is a living, breathing thing...

“You okay?” Poe asks as he takes the driver’s seat. Rey’s hands have landed on the surface of the glove compartment in front of her, feeling the vibrations, sensing the creature that is Poe’s bright orange sports car humming in quiet, secretive satisfaction at Rey’s touch.

She looks at Poe. _Ἡρακλῆς,_ her mind supplies. Unhelpfully.

“Fine! I’m fine. So, where to?” she asks, as she shakes her head and removes her palms from where they were weirdly settled on the shiny wood finish.

She ignores the way the car seems to protest the loss of her touch.

.:.

It starts with the car, but it doesn’t end there. 

When Rey notices that the vehicle she’s sitting in is reverberating in a language meant for its driver, she turns her attention to Poe:

And that is when she realizes that he isn’t like most people. 

When Rey had been somewhere in the ages before ten, she’d often drawn. She had used five stubby crayons to pass the time in her foster parents’ attic, filling scratch papers with various scenarios and stick figures. And when she wanted to show people who were _special,_ who were decidedly different from everyone else in her made-up stories, she gave lines from her dirty yellow crayon. Like a glow to indicate that they were indeed _not_ like the other stick figures in her drawings, the way she wished she could be un-ordinary herself.

Life had strangled all semblance of childish imagination out of her since, but the memory comes back to her now. Pure and untainted, like she had kept it clean in a box at the back of her memories. 

She tries not to stare at Poe too long, tries to keep up with his inquisitive and friendly nature, answering his questions and making small talk about his work and hers as he drives. She tries, she does. 

But his otherness is as plain to her as if he had yellow crayola lines radiating from his person.

“You sure you’re okay? You look a bit disturbed,” Poe asks as he pulls up to Canto Bight, just before opening the door for the valet parking attendant. 

Rey nods once, more conscious now that she has to school her expressions. _I’m not gonna think about how you’re not like everyone else._

For the most part, Rey is prepared to ignore it. It’s easy enough to park the observation at the back of her mind as some kind of delayed reaction to last night’s post-traumatic stress. But when the valet attendant takes Poe’s seat before she is able to exit the passenger side, she thinks she glimpses a pair of horns _,_ short and stubby on his temples...

She blinks and there are no horns.

Only the unmistakable vibrations of a thing not being entirely what it seems to be.

Civil twilight has started to touch the edge of the horizon, giving a pink-peach backdrop to the small-town silhouettes of Cantonica Avenue, the distant mid-rise buildings reflecting the sun’s fading gold. Like mirrors saluting the end of the day. 

Between exiting the car and entering the restaurant, Rey stands for a moment, squinting against the light.

She could almost swear she hears a zipping sound, from way above her. _The sound of the sky closing down for the night_ , she thinks, and the silly thought is a scary reminder of this morning. And how everything has changed.

She stuffs down an impending panic, and resolves to, first off, get through a first date.

~.:.~  

As food goes, Canto Bight isn’t half bad.

It’s no breakfast at _Maz’s Inn_ , and she certainly wouldn’t be caught dead paying for her _bistecca fiorentina_. She’s almost guilty when she sees the menu with its English subtitles, but Poe had been very clear that he was going to pay, and that “If you don’t order at least two entrées, I’ll be offended,” he tells her, clearly having gotten his insider knowledge of Rey’s eating habits from Rose, henceforth now referred to as _the traitor_.

And Rey doesn’t normally ( _never ever_ ) turn down an offer of free food.

The only problem is her appetite isn’t quite what it is tonight.

Not since feeling a vehicle’s respiratory system on the twenty-minute drive, then glimpsing horns on the valet attendant, and hearing the sound of a sunset zipping across the sky. And feeling like her date were somewhat less than— or _more than—_ human.

From there, things just started to seem, well, strange _._

Not “unusual”, “out-of-the-ordinary”, “this is rather uncanny” kind of strange.

More like _Have I entered the Twilight Zone because none of this is making sense and it makes me feel very nauseous?_ kind of strange.

The feeling of things not being exactly what they look like had been growing inside Rey since this morning (as triggered by last night, Rey can only assume). But now, she’s seeing things and hearing them as they are. As though for the first time. 

Which is infinitely worse.

A waitress’ eyes blinks at her horizontally.

She thinks she sees a tail quickly brush against the side of her chair as a customer walks past.

She would turn her head at the sound of hooves, and would blink to see them on a passerby.

She continues to sense Poe a little differently than everyone else. At one point halfway through her wild mushroom soup, she thinks she hears him think:

“ _Strange girl.”_

She eyes snap up to him so fast, as though his words — his thought? _—_ had caught fire.

He is taken by her urgency, her gaze holding him hostage as a spoonful of risotto pauses halfway to his mouth. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing. Nothing, sorry.” Rey shakes her head and goes back to her slow-going meal. “So, what made you the victim of my best friend’s terrible attempts to set me up?” Rey asks, trying to squelch the uncomfortable feeling of going mad.

Poe chuckles. “Is it so bad?”

“No! No,” Rey says, gesturing to brush something invisible away from her, which is just as likely their lack of chemistry. “I like it here. Best soup I’ve had in ages. But I have to ask why.”

“Why what?”

“You seem like you… I don’t know, like you’re not the type to need to get set up on a blind date.” Rey follows up the awkward wording with a spoonful of soup she hopes she chokes on.

“I like mingling. It helps keep me human,” he says, and his warm smile is something Rey very much appreciates. She likes him, at the very least. “And it also helps with my assignments, you know. Getting to know people is part of the job. Helps me focus my story beats.”

“Didn’t know I was a story,” Rey quips. He makes it easy.

Poe looks at her, and there is a very short lilt, before he replies. “Neither did I, but here we are.”

She continues to indulge Poe in small talk, if only to distract herself from the rather depressing fact that she is, in all probability, losing her mind right now _,_ but Rey is nothing if not determined. She opens up about the challenges of running a cafe, coming to America from across the Atlantic, finding Finn and Rose, all the while parking every little nonsensical “observation” at the very back of her conscious thought while trying to keep her hands from shaking too much. 

“So, where you from?” Poe asks, wiping his mouth with his table napkin like a proper gentleman.

“I told you, I grew up in London—” 

“No, but I mean. Where’d your parents come from? Were they city-folk? Londoners, too? Or are you secretly some long-lost Greek princess looking to escape her royal duties by skipping across the pond?”

Rey snorts. Not because he doesn’t know she’s from the system, but because he’d put her side by side with the concept of royalty. “That’s pretty specific.”

“ _You’re_ pretty specific,” Poe retorts.

Rey barely has time to respond when she turns her head, and she catches sight of a customer walking into a wall. Just walking into a wall, their body entering the solid shape of it and disappearing into the renaissance brocade-pattern wallpaper.

There is a moment of disorientation. 

Rey’s heart jolts, stutters wildly, tries to hammer its way out of her breastbone.

She senses a few waiters eye her curiously. One of them has short, stubby horns, if she dared to look without blinking.

She is struck by the sudden feeling of being so very observable.

“Sorry, if you’re just— Can you excuse me for— I just need—” 

Rey mumbles her excuses in a daze as she hurriedly stands up and tries to get away from the dinnertime noise inside the restaurant. She smiles tightly at Poe, grabs her purse, motions wordlessly to outside, and hopes to God in heaven above that he doesn’t follow her because watching reality crumble to pieces around her is hard enough; she doesn’t need her first date of the decade to be _a bloody fucking witness._

She rushes out of the restaurant and heads straight for the deserted parking lot on the side of the building, the streetlamps illuminating the graffitied brick wall as she leans against it. Her hand comes up to her chest, feeling her heart pounding as something real to hold on to.

Before everything else slips away.

Closing her eyes, she reaches deep into herself for the kind of willpower that has kept her afloat on this pitiful earth thus far:

_Okay, Rey. Okay. So, you’re seeing things. And hearing things. It’s okay, a lot of people go through this. It happens, and you’re just stressed. You’ll  just have to see a professional as soon as possible…_

She takes control of her shaky breaths slowly, inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth, calming herself with closed eyes and a little pep talk. She can feel her heart settling down as she tries to reign in her panicky state, but:

_Watch out, kid!_

The thought makes her open her eyes and not a second later, something appears directly in front of her:

Darkness transform first into full red eyes, nostrils flaring, large twisty horns the size of Rey’s forearms, curling backwards. A snout, teeth. The head of a bull on an upright body, bearing down on her, eclipsing her in its shadow even as she has to peer up to see it assemble its large and monstrous self in the space before her eyes.

Rey feels it, too. In the invisible way of hers, where there is now something _,_ instead of nothing just moments before. 

_I’m seeing things. This is my imagination. This is not real._

But the warmth of its body drafts towards Rey, the smell of animal triggering her gag reflex.

She cannot scream. Terror has lodged itself in her throat.

The thing exhales. Rey feels the heat of its breath, the stench of rotting meat, of old elevators and damp sewers and dark places, brushing past her cheek. The bull-man bears down on hear, its eyes hypnotic and expressively focused, and she feels it; something like a string of darkness that doesn’t belong to her, prodding her senses, begging entrance into her mind. 

_“Hello, little one.”_

The creature twists its large mouth in the approximation of a smirk. The words are ragged, grisly, sharp things that Rey does not audibly hear. _It’s talking to me,_ Rey thinks, and what remains of her trembles with adrenaline, while everything else— her breathing, her agency— leaves her body.

_“I see you are no commoner. A freak, are you?”_

Rey dares not move. But the creature’s hot breath smokes through its cracked and flaring nostrils.

“ _What wonders they’ll do to you, strange girl. You’ll fetch a good price. Might even up my fees.”_

Time stretches. The creature lifts a large, meaty finger slowly, up, up to where a claw extends to hover right beside Rey’s temple.

_“No screams? I was looking forward to that.”_

Her heart jackhammers wildly. 

And with those last words drifting towards Rey, the bull-man lunges. 

For some miracle, her self-preservation kicks in and she is ducking out of its way, throwing herself onto the pavement in an effort to get away from the monster crashing against the brick wall. It turns to her, uncoordinated and lumbering, just as she is trying to get to her feet.

She feels something dig into her calves. She falls onto her elbows once more.

The pain is secondary to the mind-numbing shock of it sinking in.

Something awakens inside her. It turns into a strangled scream. 

Panic floods her system, adrenaline powers her like fury, something wretched tearing up her throat as she scrambles for purchase on the concrete of the parking lot trying to crawl away, feeling the sharpness embedded in her legs, pulling her as she struggles forward until—

The monster loosens its clawed grip.

It releases her and Rey stands up and makes to run... 

But she turns around at the prickly feeling of another being appearing out of nowhere. Rey freezes at the sight.

The creature, the large bull-man, is now impaled on a blade sticking out of its torso. A second later, and it falls on its face. 

Rey jumps back, feels her stomach lurch at the monster’s dead body.

But behind it is a man she can now recognise.

Her panic does not lessen; instead, a dam breaks, and memories of last night flood her consciousness and she feels control slip from her. 

He disappears just as Rey starts to feel a strange kind of burning, a cosmic buildup inside her, like her body were made out of livewire, except for the arm that suddenly wraps around her waist and the hand that clamps over her mouth and Rey blinks, and she’s not in the bare parking lot anymore, she’s in her apartment, lightheaded and heavy and utterly out of control, carried on floods of sensation, her skin feeling electric, the thick air wavering around her and she would explode, she feels fit to crack open, her bones are glass in her flesh, her mind spinning wildly into a trance bordering on excruciation—

“Do not _panic._ "

The words, murmured low near the shell of her ear, feel immediately warm. 

Rey reaches for them, for the words straddling the line between a command and a plea. Something to obey, and something to grant, carried on familiar energies that drift around her like a spell.

Distantly, she is aware of being uncentered, of her apartment shaking, swaying beneath her feet, of everything being off-axis. She nearly buckles but for the man that is standing flush behind her, his arm still around her waist and hand still on her mouth, holding her steady. Holding her to himself. 

Her vision swims in the thick of delirium. 

“Shhh. Don’t panic,” he tells her again, and she is gripping his arm for dear life _,_ but she feels his words enter her like vapour again as his arms anchor her to sanity. She closes her eyes.

“That’s it. Don’t panic, Rey.”

Something worms its way into her skin. A humming calm that doesn’t belong to her. Control returns slowly, starting with her sense of thought, trickling down into her sense of emotions. And finally, a physical awareness of her body: bone-tired and wracked with stress and tremors, lightheaded. Pressed up against the man who had kidnapped her last night.

And just now too, she realizes.

The pain in her left leg comes back to her as well. And with it, she gives in, her eyes rolling into the back of her head as she loses consciousness and her sense of balance completely. She buckles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen ok im sorry it has to happen like a slow-burn because these two kids are in the center of like five central themes and honestly i like writing kylo ben trying to save rey's ass so many times and also mayhaps somwehre in the great beyond padme and anakin have a running bet on how their s2pid grandkid's gonna get the girl idk man.
> 
> and also: eros x psyche is one of the weirdest and slightly (IMO) misogynistic stories in Greek lit, so i'm adding extra doses of proper Chivalry™ in this story to make up for it. hurt/comfort can be expected.
> 
> next chapter is fun but also a pain in the ass. :) thank you for reading, and im so excited MWAHAHAHA.
> 
> comments are <3!


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